Optimum DCT type-I based transceiver model and effective channel estimation for uplink NB-IoT system

Abstract Single-tone and multi-tone transmissions in the narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) uplink system can be accomplished by employing different orthogonal basis. In this paper, we develop an uplink NB-IoT baseband system model and derive the corresponding analytical signal model based on the discrete cosine transform type-I (DCT-I) domain. Basically, the circular convolution and channel matrix diagonalization issues for designing DCT-based systems are addressed without exploiting any redundancy (a prefix and a suffix sequences, and zero-padding (ZP)) into each transmitted data symbol blocks. In our proposed DCT-I based transceiver, we employ a standard cyclic prefix (CP) and apply discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and inverse DFT (IDFT) operations directly to make the channel matrix circulant and diagonal, resulting in the use of one-tap frequency-domain channel equalizer without incorporating extra front-end prefilter at the receiver. Furthermore, we propose novel least squares (LS) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimators by considering the energy concentration and spectral compaction properties of DCT-I for the uplink NB-IoT system. The expressions for the DCT-I domain LS and LMMSE estimators are derived for channel frequency response estimation and mean square error computation. Finally, the viability of the proposed CP-DCT-I-NB-IoT uplink system, as well as the channel estimators, are tested compared with the standardized CP-DFT-NB-IoT and ZP-DCT type-2 even based single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems through rigorous computer simulations.