Joint Design of Pilot Power and Pilot Pattern for Sparse Cognitive Radio Systems

Existing works design the pilot pattern for sparse channel estimation, assuming that the power of all pilots is equal. However, equal power allocation is not optimal in cognitive radio (CR) systems. In this correspondence, we jointly design the pilot power and pilot pattern for sparse channel estimation in orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing-based CR systems, based on the rule of mutual incoherence property that minimizes the coherence of the measurement matrix used for the sparse recovery. Under the sum power constraint and peak power constraint, the pilot design is formulated as a joint optimization problem, which is then decoupled into tractable sequential formations. Given a pilot pattern, we formulate the design of pilot power as a second-order cone programming. Then, we propose a joint design algorithm, which includes discrete optimization for pilot pattern and continuous optimization for pilot power. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better channel estimation performance in terms of mean square error and bit error rate and can further improve the spectrum efficiency by 2.4%, compared with existing algorithms assuming equal pilot power.