Position-based compressed channel estimation and pilot design for high-mobility OFDM systems

Abstract—With the development of high-speed trains (HSTs) in many countries, providing broadband wireless services in HSTs is crucial. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely adopted for broadband wireless communications due to its high spectral efficiency. However, OFDM is sensitive to the time selectivity caused by high-mobility channels, which costs much spectrum or time resources to obtain the accurate channel state information (CSI). Therefore, the channel estima-tion in high-mobility OFDM systems has been a long-standing challenge. In this paper, we first propose a new position-based high-mobility channel model, in which the HST’s position infor-mation and Doppler shift are utilized to determine the positions of the dominant channel coefficients. Then, we propose a joint pilot placement and pilot symbol design algorithm for compressed channel estimation. It aims to reduce the coherence between the pilot signal and the proposed channel model and, hence, can improve channel estimation accuracy. Simulation results demon-strate that the proposed method performs better than existing channel estimation methods over high-mobility channels. Further-more, we give an example of the designed pilot codebook to show the practical applicability of the proposed scheme. Index Terms—Channel estimation, compressed sensing (CS), high-mobility channels, orthogonal frequency-division multiplex-ing (OFDM), position-based channel model. I