A Self-Organizing Frequency Approach to 802.11p Channel Estimation

We consider in this paper the mobility challenges that emerge in the context of vehicular wireless communications. Specifically, we research the problem of estimating the mobile doubly selective channels for the IEEE 802.11p orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing-based communication. To mitigate some of the major challenges imposed by the time-varying vehicular environments and to solve this estimation problem a new standard-compliant channel estimator block is proposed. The estimator structure is an innovative construct stemming from the idea of subcarrier frequencies self-organization, which leverages intersubbands connections through decision directed feedback, spectral smoothing, and time tracking. Comparisons between the new method and existing alternatives already indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms the latter. Furthermore, the bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) performance of the new estimator is close to the one with perfect channel state information for low and medium SNRs.