Channel estimation based on pilot and data traffic channels for DS/CDMA systems

A scheme for channel impulse response estimation is proposed for next generation direct sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) systems where a pilot channel is simultaneously transmitted with a data traffic channel in the reverse link. In contrast to a conventional scheme utilizing only pilot channel for channel estimation, the proposed scheme exploits channel information in both the pilot and data traffic channels by combining channel estimates from these two channels. The combining coefficients are derived to minimize the channel estimate mean square error. The proposed schemes are found to improve significantly the channel estimation accuracy and BER performance through analysis and simulations.