Achievable Outage Rates with Improved Decoding of BICM Multiband OFDM under Channel Estimation Errors

We consider the decoding of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) applied to multiband OFDM for practical scenarios where only a noisy (possibly very bad) estimate of the channel is available at the receiver. First, a decoding metric based on the channel a posteriori probability density, conditioned on the channel estimate is derived and used for decoding BICM multiband OFDM. Then, we characterize the limits of reliable information rates in terms of the maximal achievable outage rates associated to the proposed metric. We also compare our results with the outage rates of a system using a theoretical decoder. Our results are useful for designing a communication system where a prescribed quality of service (QoS), in terms of achievable target rates with small error probability, must be satisfied even in the presence of imperfect channel estimation. Numerical results over both realistic UWB and theoretical Rayleigh fading channels show that the proposed method provides significant gain in terms of BER and outage rates compared to the classical mismatched detector, without introducing any additional complexity.