A DFT-based channel estimation for mobile communication systems without priori channel delay spread information

Channel estimation is one of the most important parts in current mobile communication systems. Among the huge contributions in channel estimation studies, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based channel estimation has attracted lots of interests since it can not only be easily implemented but also have acceptable performance in practical systems. In this paper, we propose an improved DFT-based channel estimation scheme that tries to clean the reference signals in the time domain before being used for interpolation using the estimated noise variance from reference signals on multiple orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols via the property of DFT. The proposed channel estimation scheme does not need any priori channel information. We validate the proposed channel estimation scheme in various channel models via simulations and comparison with conventional channel estimation schemes.