Reed-Solomon code-based sparse channel estimation for OFDM systems

A novel efficient algorithm for the estimation of sparse channel impulse response (CIR) is addressed for OFDM systems. The innovation of this algorithm comes from the fact that it equivalently sees the CIR estimation problem as a decoding one. To do so, it exploits first the channel sparsity through the modelling of the sparse CIR as a Bernoulli-Gaussian process. Then, using the relationship between the Reed-Solomon codes and the OFDM modulator it efficiently estimates the sparse CIR using directly the decoding of the OFDM received signal. The obtained simulation results highlight that using the proposed algorithm gives good estimation performance in terms of mean squares error on the sparse CIR estimates.