Pilot Design for IEEE 802.16 OFDM and OFDMA

In this paper we apply a new pilot design optimization technique to the IEEE 802.16a wireless MAN standard. Using the specifications from 802.16a, we demonstrate that significant SER improvements are possible for 802.16a in a Rayleigh fading channel by judiciously choosing where the pilots are placed and the power contained in each pilot. Specifically, for the OFDM mode, we show that up to 13 dB SNR improvement is possible by simply modifying the pilots. For the OFDMA mode we demonstrate that a more modest but still significant improvement of 1.8 dB is possible with proper pilot design.