Performance enhancement of IEEE 802.11p system using a novel channel estimation scheme

Vehicular channels are among the most challenging wireless channels due to its high time varying characteristics. However, in the IEEE 802.11p standard which designed for vehicle to vehicle (VTV) communication, the preamble based channel estimation scheme cannot guarantee a desirable equalization under urban and highway scenarios. In this paper, we first propose a novel channel estimation scheme which focus on both BER and PER improvement of IEEE 802.11p. Our scheme exploits the time domain correlation of the data pilots reconstructed by the Viterbi decoded bits and builds a reliable data pilots set (RDPS), then the frequency domain interpolation is applied to RDPS to complete the channel estimation which exploiting the frequency domain correlation of VTV channel. Furthermore, to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11p in highway scenarios, we propose a novel receiver design which combine our channel estimation scheme and spatial diversity in frequency domain to combat fast fading. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance improvement of the proposed channel estimation scheme and excellent adaptability of our spatial diversity receiver design under highway scenarios.