Impact of imperfect channel estimation on OFDM/TDM performance

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) combined with time division multiplexing (TDM), called OFDM/TDM, can bridge the conventional OFDM and single-carrier (SC) transmission by using frequency-domain equalization (FDE). Accurate channel estimation is required for FDE. A well-known channel estimation scheme is pilot-based channel estimation that uses periodically transmitted pilot signals. If a channel estimation error is present, intersymbol interference (ISI) is produced in OFDM/TDM. We apply a Gaussian approximation to the channel estimation error and theoretically investigate the impact of imperfect channel estimation on the average bit error rate (BER) performance of OFDM/TDM. It is shown by numerical evaluation that the channel estimation error degrades the BER performance more when OFDM/TDM approaches SC.