Pilot design for OFDM systems in the presence of phase noise

The bit error rate performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is severely degraded in the presence of phase noise. The effect of phase noise on an OFDM signal has been studied in the literature. The OFDM signal sub-carriers are distorted due to phase noise in two ways. First is the constant phase shift of all the sub-carriers, and second is the inter-carrier interference. A pilot structure is proposed to estimate the phase noise spectral components in every data OFDM symbol. The pilot design parameters are specifically optimized for an OFDM system in the presence of phase noise.