Channel Estimation Technique by Hidden Signal: Application in the SC-FDMA Context

This paper deals with a new channel estimation technique for Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) currently adopted for mobile radio uplink communications in 3GPP LTE standard. The principle is to exploit the statistical advantages of a specific signal added in the transmitter to estimate the channel coefficients. In contrast to a pilots signal, the added signal covers the entire useful signal band during all of the communication delay. The advantage of this proposal is to estimate the channel by kipping the same spectral efficiency. This proposal is compared to Zero-Forcing estimator with LS equalizer and MMSE equalizer. The results are very convincing in term of symbol error rate; the gain is up to 2.5 dB.