Impact of pilot lengths of PSAM on Polar code performance in Ricean fading for realistic industrial channels

Industrial applications have very tight requirements of reliability and timing, which are difficult to achieve with wireless communication. The industrial radio channel is characterised by high levels of multipath reflection and Doppler shift. The negative impact on the communication reliability can be counter-balanced with the use of Pilot Assisted Transmissions, which improve the channel estimation accuracy before the demodulated symbols are decoded and therefore lead to lower BER. However, adding pilot symbols to the transmitted frames counts as overhead and can also negatively affect the transmission time and latency. In this paper we explore the trade-off between reliability and latency created by the use of pilot symbols in industrial channels with Ricean fading and using polar codes.