A novel pilot channel-based channel estimation method for chip-interleaved MC-CDMA systems

In wireless mobile communication systems, the channel state information (CSI) is very useful information to optimize the system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel channel estimation method using two consecutive subcarriers (CE-TCS) which is based on pilot channel-based channel estimation (PCCE). The proposed CE-TCS alters the system structure in order to maintain orthogonality between data and pilot channels over two consecutive subcarriers. Contrary to the conventional PCCE, this new CE-TCS can obtain both accurate CSF and diversity gain in a frequency-interleaved multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system. Moreover, contrary to the conventional pilot tone-aided channel estimation (PTCE), CE-TCS need not change pilot pattern. Simulation results verify that the proposed method achieves a gain of about 2dB for a BER of 10^-4 compared to PTCE.