Pilot design for OFDM with null edge subcarriers

Pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has proven to be a popular technique for high-speed communication through multipath fading channels. In this paper we examine PSAM pilot design optimization in OFDM systems that employ edge null subcarriers for spectral shaping. Specifically, we show that the commonly used even pilot spacing design is suboptimal in terms of symbol estimate mean squared error (MSE) performance when a sufficient number of null subcarriers are present. We pursue a parametric design of the pilot spacings and use convex optimization techniques in order to find a pilot design that results in near-optimal symbol estimate MSE performance. Finally, we present several example PSAM OFDM pilot designs including one example based on the IEEE 802.16 standard to demonstrate performance improvements over the conventional even-spacing pilot design when null edge subcarriers are present.