Pilot sharing method for uplink OFDMA channel estimation

Abstract

This paper proposes an orthogonal pilot-aided channel estimation scheme for uplink (UL) orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. In the proposed method, the users utilizing adjacent UL subchannels in the frequency domain share some common pilot subcarriers by using orthogonal pilot patterns. In this way, each user can effectively use more pilot subcarriers and can improve the quality of channel estimation, especially for the data subcarriers located near the edges of a multiple access (MA) user subchannel in the frequency domain, and can offer a better bit error rate than user dedicated pilot allocations.