Performance and complexity evaluation of pilot-based channel estimation algorithms for 3GPP LTE downlink

Several pilot-based channel estimation algorithms for 3GPP LTE downlink are tested under multipath Rayleigh fading channel in this paper. The conventional channel estimation techniques, such as two dimensional (2-D) wiener filter, two 1-dimensional wiener filters (2×1)-D and maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) are applied first. Considering the practical implementation, we propose to estimate channel by combining time-dimension wiener filter and MLE, which shows a good tradeoff between system performance and complexity. The complexities of these algorithms are calculated in terms of the number of complex multiplications (CMs) and the performances are evaluated by showing the uncoded bit error rates (BER).