Novel Preamble Design for Channel Estimation in FBMC/OQAM Systems

The nonorthogonality between the real and imaginary FBMC/OQAM modulated signals complicates the channel estimation (CE) process, and conventional OFDM CE methods cannot be directly applied to FBMC/OQAM. The conventional preamble-based CE schemes in FBMC/OQAM systems are mainly based on the interference approximation method (IAM) to improve the estimation performance. In this paper, we develop a novel preamble structure to improve the CE performance. We exploit the symmetry pattern to cancel interference and take into account the interference weights in this symmetric structure. The conventional preamble and the proposed preamble are compared via simulations in the IEEE 802.22, 3GPP Vehicular A and Pedestrian A channels. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed preamble can achieve better bit error ratio (BER) and mean squared error (MSE) performance under the three channel models considered.