System-level evaluation of a downlink OFDM switched-beam system with Kalman-based joint channel estimation and beam selection

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of an OFDM switched-beam system based on Kalman filtering for joint channel estimation and beam selection. For this purpose, we develop a system-level simulator which computes the signal to interference ratio (SIR) for a reference mobile user. For a given system capacity in terms of average number of users per cell, the resulting SIR distribution collected from a large number of system-level snapshots translates the link-level throughput vs. SNR results into a system-level cumulative distribution function (cdf) of the user throughput from which different meaningful system-level performance measures such as the average throughput can be computed. Simulations suggest that the proposed Kalman-based OFDM switched-beam system offers improved performance over slow fading channels in terms of link-level frame error rate (FER) and system-level capacity or average throughput per user or cell.