Fixed Point Channel Estimation for 802.11a Wireless Receivers

We consider a wireless network system based on the IEEE 802.11a standard and propose a fixed point algorithm that has low computational complexity and is statistically optimal in a white Gaussian noise environment (Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator). Simulation results in an exponentially decaying Rayleigh multipath fading channel, show that 10 bit precision is sufficient for the channel estimation algorithm, in order to get practically the same performance (Packet Error Rate) as the corresponding floating point algorithm. This is achieved using a frequency domain window resulting in a complexity reduction of about 70% w.r.t. straight matrix-vector estimation approach.