Pilot assisted channel estimation for MC-CDMA signal transmission using overlap FDE

Recently, multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) has been attracting much attention as a broadband wireless access technique for the next generation mobile communications systems. Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can take advantage of the channel frequency-selectivity and improve the average bit error rate (BER) performance due to frequency-diversity gain. However, conventional MC-CDMA requires the insertion of guard interval (GI) and this reduces the transmission efficiency. Overlap FDE technique has been proposed that requires no GI insertion. Recently, we showed that MC-CDMA using overlap FDE can provide almost the same BER performance as the conventional MC-CDMA downlink using the GI insertion. However, our previous work assumed the ideal channel estimation. In this paper, we propose a pilot assisted channel estimation technique suitable for MC-CDMA downlink using overlap FDE and evaluate the BER performance by computer simulation.