Novel Preamble-Based Channel Estimation for OFDM/OQAM Systems

OFDM/OQAM has been considered as an attractive alternative to classic OFDM with cyclic prefix (CP) over doubly dispersive channels. By utilising well designed pulse shapes and removing CP, OFDM/OQAM has the advantage of reduced out-of-band energy and a theoretically higher spectral efficiency. However, channel estimation over doubly dispersive channels has been a big problem for OFDM/OQAM due to the nonorthogonality between the real and imaginary parts of its modulated signals. Therefore conventional channel estimation (CE) methods used for OFDM cannot be directly applied to OFDM/OQAM. Recently a preamble-based CE method - interference approximation method (IAM) - has been proposed to ease this task. By treating the intrinsic interference from neighbour symbols as known information, two heuristic preamble sequences have been constructed based on tentative observations, which turn out to be suboptimal. In this paper, we present a general theoretical framework for IAM preamble design and apply it to identify the optimal IAM preamble sequence which results in a higher gain. Numerical results have verified the effectiveness of the theoretical framework and a gain of 2.4 dB against CP-OFDM has been demonstrated with the new preamble in various doubly dispersive channels with a QPSK modulation.