Simplified residual phase correction mechanism for the IEEE 802.11a standard

It is of common use in OFDM transmission to define some of the sub-carriers as pilots. These sub-carriers contain information, which is known a priori at the receiver and are typically used for channel estimation. In the special case of the IEEE 802.11a standard, the pilots cannot be used for channel estimation because of their wide separation in the frequency domain. However, they are useful to track phase variations remaining after synchronization during reception of a frame. In this paper we propose a very simple mechanism to estimate and correct these phase variations using the pilots. We also present a channel estimator necessary to support such a simplified mechanism.