A Simplified LMMSE Channel Estimation Algorithm for OFDM Systems

Hu Feng , Li Jianping
School of Information Engineering Communication University of China Beijing, China Email: hufeng_198@163.com

AbstractOrthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a key technique of multi-carrier transmission to meet high data rate requirement of wireless communication. Channel state information (CSI) derived from channel estimation is necessary for receivers to accurately recover the transmitted signals. It is well known that the LMMSE (Linear Minimum Mean Square Error) algorithm is one of the best linear receivers for OFDM channel estimation, which provides better mean squared error (MSE) performance but requires more computations than others. In this paper, a simplified LMMSE channel estimation algorithm using Fourier Transform technique and an appropriate training-sequences-aided is proposed without loss of MSE performance. Simulation results show that the proposed LMMSE algorithm can effectively lower computational complexity. When adopting 256 pilot symbols in OFDM systems with Rayleigh fading channels, the time spending in channel estimation reduces about a quarter. Keywords-channel estimation; computational complexity LMMSE; OFDM; FFT;

to lower computational complexity without loss of MSE performance. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the pilot-based OFDM system model is described. Section III discusses LS channel estimators, and a high-complexity LMMSE estimator is studied. Interpolation methods and a way to mitigate the problem of complexity are deliberated in Section IV. Section V presents the simulation results, which indicate the BER and MSE improvements [3]. Section VI concludes the paper. II. A. CHANNEL AND SYSTEM MODEL

I.

INTRODUCTION

As a hotspot and a promising technique for future high data rate systems, OFDM has been adopted by many wireless communications. In wireless systems, transmitted information reaches receivers after passing through Rayleigh fading channels. For conventional coherent receivers, the effect of the channel on the transmitted signal must be estimated to recover the transmitted information. As long as the receiver accurately estimates how the channel modifies the transmitted signal, it can recover the transmitted information [1]. The capability to estimate the varying channels accurately and effectively remains a challenging topic. LMMSE is widely used in the OFDM channel estimation since it is optimum in minimizing the MSE of the channel estimates in the presence of Rayleigh fading. LMMSE uses additional information like the operating SNR and the other channel statistics. LMMSE is a smoother/interpolater, and hence is very attractive for the channel estimation of OFDM systems with pilot subcarriers. However, the computational complexity of LMMSE is very high due to extra information incorporated in the estimation technique [1] [2]. Thus, a modified LMMSE estimator is proposed in this paper in order

system model Fig. 1 shows a typical block diagram of OFDM system with pilot signal assisted. The binary information data are grouped and mapped into multi-amplitude-multi-phase signals, depending on the modulation type. The serial data symbols are then converted to parallel blocks. In order to eliminate interference between parallel data streams, each low-rate data stream modulates orthogonal subcarriers by means of the IFFT. A cyclic prefix is then added to eliminate the effect of the ISI. For proper digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion and lowpass filtering (LPF), the unused subcarriers (virtual subcarriers) which are contiguous with the occupied subcarriers should be included in the cyclic prefix [2]. For an OFDM system with N subcarriers, the equivalent low-pass signal in time domain can be represented as:

Figure 1. A typical pilot-based OFDM system

The project sponsored by the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry (2007[24])

978-1-4244-4639-1/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

X (n) =

Es P1 j 2 nk / N dk e , L n N 1 N k =0

(1)

where Es is the symbol energy per subcarrier, N is the FFT size, P is the number of subcarriers, L is the length of the guard interval inserted to prevent possible inter-symbol interference in OFDM systems. After the addition of CP, which is larger than the expected maximum excess delay of the channel, and D/A conversion, the transmitted signal is then sent to Rayleigh multi-path fading channels. To the contrary, the proper analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion and lowpass filtering (LPF) are intercalated in the receiver. After removing the guard interval from yg(n) the received samples y(n) are sent to a DFT block to demultiplex the multicarrier signals. B. channel model The aim of this section is to explain how to obtain the SNR for OFDM systems using a conventional channel estimation method when n2 is estimated. In many radio channels, there may be more than one path from transmitter to receiver. We will consider the system shown in Fig. 1, where X(k) are the transmitted symbols, h(k) is the channel impulse response, w(k) is the white complex Gaussian channel noise and y(k) are the received symbols. And then the received signal y(k) can be expressed as
y ( k ) = h ( k , l ) X ( k l ) + w( k )
l =0 L 1

Figure 3. Comparisons of MSEs in different multi-path channels

y ( n) = X ( n) h( n, l ) e j 2 lk / N + w( n) e j 2 k / N
l =0

L 1

= X ( n) H ( n ) + W ( n )

(3)

which is the Fourier transform of the channel impulse response at time n. Thus, the received signal at the output of the FFT processor for the OFDM symbol can be written as

Y (k ) = X ( k ) H ( k ) + W (k ) = X (k ) F (k )h(k ) + F (k ) w(k )
III. CHANNEL ESTIMATION

(2)

(4)

The received signal is not corrupted by previous multicarrier symbols, due to the presence of the guard interval. Thus, in this interval the received signal becomes

Before going into the details of the estimation techniques, it is necessary to give the LS estimation technique as it is needed by many estimation techniques as an initial estimation. Starting from system model of SISO-OFDM given in Eq. 17 as [4]

Y = XH + W

(5)

The LS estimator for the cyclic impulse response h H minimizes (Y XFh) (Y XFh) and generates
H LS = F ( F H X H XF ) 1 F H X H Y

(6)

Note that HLS also corresponds to the estimator structure in the appendix. Since (6) reduces to

H LS = X H Y

(7)

Figure 2. Comparisons of MSEs in Rayleigh fading channel

The LS estimate of HLS is susceptible to Gaussian noise and inter-carrier interference (ICI). Because the channel responses of data subcarriers are obtained by interpolating the channel responses of pilot subcarriers, the performance of OFDM systems based on comb-type pilot arrangement is highly dependent on the rigorousness of estimate of pilot signals.

Thus an estimate better than the LS estimate is required. In (8), a low-rank approximation is applied to a linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) estimator that uses the frequency correlation of the channel. The key idea to reduce the complexity is using some special algorithms to derive an optimal low-rank estimator, where performance is essentially preserved.
1 H lmmse = RHH LS R HH H LS
LS

increase the estimator complexity and reduce the performance slightly [7] [8].

FF H = NI N

(14)

(8)

The LMMSE channel estimator (11) is of considerable complexity since a matrix inversion is involved. To simplify this estimator, we exploit the optimal training scheme (13) to get an optimal low-complexity LMMSE channel estimator. Then, the estimated channel (11) can be written as
H lmmse = FRhh ( Rhh +

IV.

LMMSE CHANNEL ESTIMATION

A. LMMSE channel estimation method In this subsection, the unification of LMMSE with the Fourier Transform technique will be presented. The unification of LMMSE with the other transform domain techniques is also possible if the LMMSE estimation is performed in the corresponding transform domain technique. As most of the transform domain techniques are exploited for the pilot subcarriers aided OFDM channel estimation, the LMMSE formulation for the pilot subcarriers with equal spacing will be used, and the case of non-equal pilot spacing is very similar [1]. Starting with the matrix equation,

n2
N

I N ) 1 F 1 H LS

(15)

An important difference to the equivalent system model devised by (15) is denoting the diagonal entry of Rhh and n2IN as and . Exploiting the noncorrelation property of the Rayleigh fading channels of different links [9], we can obtain the autocorrelation matrix of the channel vector h:

Rhh = E{hh H } = diag ([ h20 ... h2( L1) ])

H = Fh

(9)

= diag ([ h20 ... 2

01, N L ]) h ( L 1)

(16)

The auto-covariance matrix of H when all the subcarriers are used as the pilots can be expressed as
E{HH H } = E{Fh( Fh) H } RHH = FRhh F H

Using (16) and (14), LMMSE channel estimator (15) can be rewritten as
H lmmse = F

(10)

F 1 H LS

(17)

Based on the LMMSE criterion, the estimated channel can be written as

=F

N +

F H H LS

H lmmse = RHH ( RHH + n2 ( XX H ) 1 ) 1 H LS

(11)

For positive definite M M matrix A with its mth diagonal element given by am, the following inequality holds:

tr(A -1 )

1 m=1 a m

(12)

Where equality holds if and only if A is diagonal [5]. Based on this lemma, the minimum of MSE is achieved if and only if XHX is diagonal [6]. Therefore, the optimal training scheme is
X H X = IN

(13)

B. Low-complexity LMMSE channel estimator Note that the LMMSE estimators have been derived under the assumption of known channel correlation and noise variance. In practice these quantities, Rhh and n2, are either taken fixed or estimated, possibly in an adaptive way, it will

Figure 4. Comparisons of SERs in Rayleigh fading channels

V.

SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The performance of the proposed estimator is evaluated by computer simulations using mean and mean-square error (MSE). In the simulations we consider a system operating with a bandwidth of 500 kHz, divided into 64 tones with a total symbol period of 138 ps, of which 10 ps is a cyclic prefix. Sampling is performed with a 500 kHz rate [10]. From MSE curves in Fig. 2, it is clearly observed that the improved estimator has much smaller MSE than that of LS estimator and has almost the same MSE as the conventional LMMSE estimator. When SNRs becomes more than 25 dB, the proposed estimator is very approximate to LS method estimators. MSE curves based on different multi-path channel models are shown in Fig. 3. The more the number of multi-path increases, the better performance of the proposed estimator will be achieved. The symbol-error rate (SER) curves presented in Fig. 4 are based on the mean-square errors of the channel estimations. Depending upon admissible complexity, up to 5dB gain can be obtained at particular SNRs by using a modified LMMSE estimator instead of the LS estimator. The gain in SNR declines larger compared with the LS estimator. VI. CONCLUSIONS The improved LMMSE channel estimation proposed in this paper can be used to efficiently estimate the channels in OFDM systems. The advantage of LMMSE estimate over Rayleigh channels can be shown in the simulation. However, its complexity is higher compared with that of the LS estimator. By exploiting the inherent orthogonal characteristic of the optimal training scheme, a low complexity LMMSE estimate based on Fourier Transform technique without loss of MSE performance is introduced. Due to less computation, the modified LMMSE estimator costs 531 ms to deal with 256 bit symbols, resulting in a deduction of 141 ms. APPENDIX PROOF OF (15) Substituting (14) and (13) into (15) yields
H lm m se = R H H ( R H H + n2 ( X
H

TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS 2ND QUARTER, VOLUME 9, NO. 2, 2007. [2] Yang-Seok Choi and Peter J. Voltz, On Channel Estimation and Detection for Multicarrier Signals in Fast and Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 49, NO. 8, AUGUST 2001. [3] Tuncer Can Aysal, and Kenneth E. Barner, Constrained Decentralized Estimation Over NoisyChannels for Sensor Networks, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 56, NO. 4, APRIL 2008. [4] W. G. Jeon, K. H. Paik, and Y. S. Cho, An Efficient Channel Estimation Technique for OFDM Systems with Transmitter Diversity, Proc. IEEE Intl. Symp. Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Commun., vol. 2, London, UK, Sept. 2000, pp. 124650, Sept. 2000. [5] S. M. Kay, Fundamentals of Statistical Signal Processing:Estimation Theory, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA,1993. [6] Hua Zhang, Ye (Geoffrey) Li, and Yi Yuan-Wu, Practical Considerations on Channel Estimation for Up-Link MC-CDMA Systems, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008. [7] Kai Yan, Sheng Ding and Yunzhou Qiu, A Low-Complexity LMMSE Channel EstimationMethod for OFDM-Based Cooperative Diversity Systems with Multiple Amplify-and-Forward Relays, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and NetworkingVolume 2008. [8] F. Gao, T. Cui, and A. Nallanathan, On channel estimation and optimal training design for amplify and forward relay networks, IEEE Transactions onWireless Communications, vol.7, no. 5, part 2, pp. 19071916, 2008. [9] K. Kim, H. Kim, and H. Park, OFDM channel estimation for the amply-and-forward cooperative channel, in Proceedings of the 65th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 07), pp.16421646, Dublin, Ireland, April 2007. [10] Jan-Jaap van de Beek, Ove Edfors and Magnus Sandell, In Proceedings of Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 095), vol. 2, pp. 815-819,Chicago, USA, September 1995.

X ) 1 ) 1 H LS

= R HH ( R HH + n2 I N ) 1 H LS = FR hh F H ( FR hh F H + n2 I N ) 1 H LS = FR hh F H ( FR hh F H + = FR hh ( R hh +

n2
N

FF H ) 1 H LS

n2
N

I N ) 1 F 1 H LS

This completes the proof. REFERENCES

[1] Mehmet Kemal OZDEMIR and Huseyin Arslan, CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR WIRELESS OFDM SYSTEMS, IEEE