LTE and WiMAX: performance and complexity comparison for possible channel estimation techniques

SUMMARY The similarities between the physical layer of LTE and WiMAX systems trigger the design of a unified hardware platform. As a consequence, there exists a great need to design common blocks that can be adapted to support both of them. In this paper, the choice of the channel estimator is studied where the performance and complexity trade-off is investigated to seek a unified channel estimation design that can suit both systems under different channel conditions. The performance of different channel estimation techniques when applied to LTE and WiMAX systems is assessed and compared. Two channel profiles with different delay spreads are considered for urban macrocell and bad urban macrocell channels. Three different Doppler frequencies are assumed to illustrate the effect of users’ mobility. The estimators’ computational complexity is also thoroughly studied.Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1]  Gunther Auer,et al.  Pilot aided channel estimation for OFDM: a separated approach for smoothing and interpolation , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2005. ICC 2005. 2005.

[2]  Hossam A. H. Fahmy,et al.  FPGA implementation of an improved channel estimation algorithm for mobile WiMAX , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Microelectronics - ICM.

[3]  Dirk T. M. Slock,et al.  Performance analysis of general pilot-aided linear channel estimation in LTE OFDMA systems with application to simplified MMSE schemes , 2008, 2008 IEEE 19th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[4]  M. Rupp,et al.  An accurate and low complex channel estimator for OFDM WiMAX , 2008, 2008 3rd International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing.

[5]  Johan Eilert,et al.  Implementation Aspects of Channel Estimation for 3GPP LTE Terminals , 2011, EW.

[6]  Geoffrey Ye Li,et al.  Robust channel estimation for OFDM systems with rapid dispersive fading channels , 1998, ICC '98. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Record. Affiliated with SUPERCOMM'98 (Cat. No.98CH36220).

[7]  Daesik Hong,et al.  A New DFT-Based Channel Estimation Approach for OFDM with Virtual Subcarriers by Leakage Estimation , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[8]  Jinsang Kim,et al.  Low complexity downlink channel estimation for LTE systems , 2010, 2010 The 12th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT).

[9]  T. Yucek,et al.  A comparative study of initial downlink channel estimation algorithms for mobile WiMAX , 2007, 2007 IEEE Mobile WiMAX Symposium.

[10]  S. Khatun,et al.  Time-domain RLS-based channel estimation for MIMO OFDM systems , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications and Malaysia International Conference on Communications.

[11]  Jeffrey G. Andrews,et al.  Pilot-to-data power ratio for maximizing the capacity of MIMO-OFDM , 2004 .

[12]  Yushi Shen,et al.  Channel Estimation in OFDM Systems , 2006 .