Bandwidth-efficient pilot-symbol-aided technique for multipath-fading channels

Pilot-symbol-aided (PSA) transmission is one of the effective methods to combat multipath-fading in digital mobile communications systems. In the PSA systems, redundant bandwidth and power are required to transmit the pilot symbols. We propose a novel fading estimation technique that requires a very low bandwidth redundancy in the PSA systems. The proposed technique uses simple linear interpolation on the pilot symbols and the detected data symbols to obtain the estimates of the channel fading effects. Monte Carlo computer simulation has been carried out to study the effects of the technique on the bit error rate performance of 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation in the flat and the frequency-selective Rayleigh-fading channels corrupted with cochannel interference and additive white Gaussian noise. Results have shown that the proposed technique can, at the expense of a little power efficiency, significantly improve the bandwidth efficiency of the PSA systems using receivers with low complexity and latency.