Noise Power and SNR Estimation for OFDM Based Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, noise power and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimations for OFDM based wireless communication sys-tems are studied. Noise power estimation, which takes into account the color and variation of noise statistics over OFDM sub-carriers into account, is considered. Instead of averaging the instantaneous noise samples estimates over all of the OFDM sub-carriers, dividing the total number of sub-carriers into several sub-groups and averaging the sub-carriers separately within each sub-group is proposed. Also, these averaged estimates over each sub-group are fur-ther averaged across several OFDM symbols in time to en-hance the performance of the noise power estimates. The proposed solution provides many local estimates, allow-ing tracking of the variation of the noise statistics across OFDM sub-carriers, which is particularly of use in sub-band adaptive modulation OFDM systems. The perfor-mance of the proposed method is evaluated via computer simulations. It is observed that the proposed solution can estimate local statistics of the noise power when the noise is colored. When the noise is white, the proposed algorithm works as good as the conventional noise power estimation schemes, showing the robustness of the proposed method