Performance of channel estimation techniques for MC-CDMA systems

This paper presents the performance of two channel estimation (CE) techniques for MC-CDMA systems. One is time domain version, where multipath delay profile is estimated and transformed to propagation characteristics of each subcarrier. The other is frequency domain version, where the received signal at the output of fast Fourier transform (FFT) is correlated by the known pilot signal in each subcarrier. We analyze the performance of the two CE techniques and show the superiority of time domain version over frequency domain version. We also show that the performance of the time domain version is dependent on the type of pilot symbols used in MC-CDMA systems.