Joint Pilot Power & Pattern Design for Compressive OFDM Channel Estimation

This letter investigates the deterministic design of pilot power and pattern for sparse channel estimation in OFDM systems based on minimizing the coherence of the DFT sub-matrix. It has been suggested that the pilot pattern forming a cyclic difference set (CDS) or almost difference set (ADS) is optimal. So, we proposed a deterministic procedure that jointly optimized for pattern and power of pilots as a solution. First, pilot patterns forming CDS/ADS were gathered through a search. Then, the power was numerically allocated to the different pilots from all the patterns. Finally, the pilot pattern and power pair leading to minimum coherence was selected from the available pairs. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme outperformed the existing methods in terms of efficiency.