Implementation and Field Experiment of a Block-Channel Estimator for 5G Physical Broadcast Channel In a Softwarized Modem

An Inter-cell Interference (ICI) significantly degrades the performance of channel estimation during fifth generation (5G) Physical Broadcast CHannel (PBCH) decoding. This paper demonstrates implementation of a block channel estimator which can suppress the effect of ICI and field experiments that show the performance of the block channel estimator. The proposed block channel estimator identifies the source of interference and estimates an accurate Channel Frequency Response (CFR) through successive cancellation processes. We present an implementation design of a block channel estimator using parallel processing and demonstrate it with a softwarized (SW) modem. The field experiments demonstrate that the proposed block channel estimator can be practically realized in both the algorithm and the implementation aspects and is beneficial in practical environments.