Time-Varying and Frequency-Selective Channel Estimation with Unequally Spaced Pilot Symbols

In this paper, an accurate and computationally efficient algorithm is proposed for estimating time-varying and frequency-selective fading channel with unequally spaced pilot symbols. By employing the time-varying coefficient polynomial interpolation method, it is proved that the time-varying channel impulse response can be estimated by the product of a constant matrix and the fading information at pilot symbol positions. Furthermore, a least square off-line training algorithm is presented to optimally calculate the constant matrix, taking into consideration of the statistics of channel fading and noise. The new algorithm can also be applied for estimating flat fading channel with equally spaced pilot symbols as a special case. Simulation results indicate that our new channel estimation algorithm leads to small mean square error for fading estimation and provides bit error rate performance close to that of the perfect channel estimation.