Novel Pilot-Assisted Channel Estimation Techniques for 3GPP LTE Downlink with Performance-Complexity Evaluation

In this paper, various of pilot-assisted channel estimation techniques for 3GPP LTE downlink are tested under multipath Rayleigh fading channel. At first, the conventional channel estimation techniques are applied with linear zero-forcing (ZF) equalizer, such as one dimensional least square (1-D LS) linear interpolation, two dimensional (2-D) wiener filter, the time and frequency dimension separate wiener filter and maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). Considering the practical implementation, we proposed two channel estimation techniques by combining time-dimension wiener filter and MLE in two manners, which showed a good tradeoff between system performance and complexity when comparing with conventional techniques. The nonlinear decision feedback equalizer (DFE) which can show a better performance than linear ZF equalizer is also implemented for mitigating inter-carrier interference (ICI) in our system. The complexity of these algorithms are calculated in terms of the number of complex multiplications (CMs) and the performances are evaluated by showing the bit error rate (BER).