Impact of Channel Estimation Error on the Performance of Time-Domain Interleaved OFDM Systems

In this paper, we study the impact of channel estimation errors on the performance of time-domain interleaved orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The time domain interleaving (TDI) is known to enhance the error performance of OFDM significantly. Nevertheless, previous work analyzed TDI assuming perfect channel estimation. In practical communication systems, channel coefficients may be inaccurately estimated. Hence, the performance of TDI systems is evaluated in this work in the presence of channel estimation errors. The obtained results show that TDI with large interleaver length provides better performance than OFDM in the presence of imperfect channel estimation. However, when the channel estimation error is large enough, TDI performance significantly deteriorates as well, particularly at high SNR values.