Bandwidth efficient optimal superimposed pilot design for channel estimation in OSTBC based MIMO-OFDM systems

This paper proposes optimal superimposed pilot (SIP) sequence design and pilot placement towards mean square error (MSE) minimization for channel estimation in spatially correlated/uncorrelated MIMO-OFDM channels. For uncorrelated channels, a closed form expression is derived for the optimal pilot sequence, number of pilot subcarriers and pilot locations. For correlated channels, the problem of designing the optimal SIP sequence is formulated as a semidefinite program. The proposed schemes lead to a substantial increase in the bandwidth efficiency since it employs pilot symbols on a significantly fewer number of subcarriers in comparison to existing schemes. It is shown that the proposed techniques achieve the Cramer-Rao bounds. In addition, a closed form analytical expression is derived for the bit-error rate of orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) based MIMO-OFDM systems including the effect of channel estimation error arising from the proposed SIP based estimation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate the improved estimation performance and bandwidth efficiency of the proposed schemes.