Joint Time-Frequency Channel Estimation for Time Domain Synchronous OFDM Systems

As the key technology of Chinese national digital television terrestrial broadcasting (DTTB) standard, time domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM) has high spectral efficiency at the cost of performance loss over fast fading channels. In this paper, a novel time-frequency signal structure is proposed to improve the system performance of TDS-OFDM over fast time-varying channels. Each TDS-OFDM symbol adopts the time-domain one-sample shifted training sequence (TS) and the frequency-domain grouped pilots as the time-frequency training information. The modulable orthogonal sequence (MOS) with perfect autocorrelation property is adopted as the TS, while each pilot group has only one non-zero central pilot surrounded by several zero pilots. The corresponding joint time-frequency channel estimation utilizes the time-domain TS for path delay estimation and the frequency-domain grouped pilots for path gain estimation, thus accurate tracking of the fast time-varying wireless channel could be achieved. Only about 1% of the total subcarriers will be occupied by the redundant grouped pilots, thus the loss in spectral efficiency is negligible. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional solutions over fast fading channels.