Decision-directed channel estimation based on iterative linear minimum mean square error for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

A decision-directed (DD) channel estimation based on iterative linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. Existing DD channel estimation is well known to have the problem of error propagation because of symbol-by-symbol detection. The proposed algorithm can estimate the correction term of current channel state information (CSI) according to the error vector of previous CSI by applying the orthogonality principle, and corrects the current CSI with this correction term. Analysis and simulation results have shown that this method has no error propagation problem. The performance of the proposed algorithm is much better than the conventional DD channel estimation, and close to the optimal LMMSE estimator, but with much less computational complexity compared with the optimal LMMSE estimator.