A robust channel estimator for high-mobility STBC-OFDM systems

In this paper, a robust channel estimator for high-mobility space-time block code-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (STBC-OFDM) systems is proposed and applied in IEEE 802.16e systems. A high-performance two-stage channel estimation method is adopted. The proposed architecture reduces computational complexity effectively and improves 85.2% of the hardware implementation. The performances of the proposed design have been demonstrated through the simulation of an STBC-OFDM system with two transmit antennas and one receive antenna. At the vehicle speed of 120 and 240 km/hr for quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation, the proposed design can achieve the bit-error rate (BER) of about 10^-4 and 10^-3 without using channel coding. Moreover, it has significant performance improvement as compared with interpolation-based channel estimation methods. The proposed channel estimator implemented in 90 nm CMOS technology can support up to 29.03 Mbps (uncoded) downlink data transmission. The design only requires 859.6 K gates and dissipates 43.71 mW at 83.3 MHz operating frequency with 1 V power supply.