On the impact of channel estimation for multiple antenna diversity reception in mobile OFDM systems

We investigate the impact of channel estimation on multiple antenna diversity reception for broadband mobile OFDM-based communication systems. We consider multiple receive antennas to combat the effects of the time-variant fading process and appropriate OFDM-based receiver structures. Given perfect channel knowledge, diversity techniques for OFDM provide both a considerable reduction of the error floor-which is due to the channel variations during one OFDM symbol-and a performance gain in terms of the required SNR (due to antenna and diversity gain). However, actual implementations will rely on noisy channel estimates and in this paper we present a straightforward sensitivity analysis that is applicable to performance assessment for practical channel estimation techniques.