Interpolation and channel tracking based receivers for coherent Mary-PSK modulations

This paper investigates decision-directed tracking and interpolation based channel estimation techniques for pilot assisted coherent Mary-PSK modulations. A Wiener filter based interpolation approach is compared with Kalman-based channel trackers. An enhancement to the decision directed approach that exploits the pilot symbols is proposed. The performance of the proposed receiver is compared with the performance of a receiver that uses channel interpolation for a variety of mobile speeds and different levels of PSK modulations. It is shown that although the proposed channel tracker improves the performance of the conventional channel trackers considerably, the interpolation based approaches performs better than the decision-directed tracking based approaches.