Kalman Filter Channel Estimation in 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 STBC MIMO-OFDM Systems

Channel estimation is a challenging problem for space time block coding (STBC) multipleinput and multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems in dynamic environments. To handle this problem and improve the system performance, this paper proposes a Kalman filter (KF) based channel estimation method applied to 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 STBC MIMO-OFDM systems. The proposed method based on the dynamic tracking property of KF is well adopted for dynamic channel estimation. First, a new orthogonal space-time codeword is adopted, and the orthogonal pilot sequences are designed to suppress the interference among transmit antennas. Then, the prediction and update characteristics of KF are researched, and the state space model is established for STBC MIMO-OFDM system. Subsequently, the channel state information (CSI) is estimated iteratively according to the KF estimation equation. At last, to further improve the accuracy of KF channel estimation, the threshold is utilized to suppress the noise in the channel impulse response (CIR) estimated by KF method. Simulation results verify that the proposed KF channel estimation method with orthogonal pilots and STBC provides better bit error rate (BER) and normalized mean square error (NMSE) performance compared with other conventional channel estimation methods, and it can be effectively adapted to dynamic multipath propagation conditions with different low and high order modulations.