IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 1, NO.
1, JANUARY 2002
Simplified Channel Estimation for OFDM Systems
With Multiple Transmit Antennas
Ye (Geoffrey) Li, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Multiple transmit-and-receive antennas can be used
in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems
to improve communication quality and capacity. In this paper,
we present two techniques to improve the performance and
reduce the complexity of channel parameter estimation: optimum
training-sequence design and simplified channel estimation. The
optimal training sequences not only simplify the initial channel
estimation, but also attain the best estimation performance. The
simplified channel estimation significantly reduces the complexity
of the channel estimation at the expense of a negligible perfor-
mance degradation. The effectiveness of the new techniques is
demonstrated through the simulation of an OFDM system with
two-transmit and two-receive antennas. The space-time coding
with 240 information bits per codeword is used for transmit
diversity. From the simulation, the required signal-to-noise ratio is
only about 9 dB for a 10% word error rate for a channel with the
typical urban- or hilly-terrain delay profile and a 40-Hz Doppler
frequency.
Index Terms—MIMO systems, OFDM, parameter estimation,
transmit diversity.
I. INTRODUCTION
M ULTIPLE transmit-and-receive antennas can be used
with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) to improve the communication capacity and quality
of mobile wireless systems. Channel parameters are required
for diversity combining, coherent detection, and decoding.
For OFDM systems with multiple transmit antennas, such
as permutation [1]–[3] and space-time coding [4], [5] based
transmit diversity, different signals are transmitted from dif-
ferent transmit antennas simultaneously. Consequently, the
received signal is the superposition of these signals, which
gives rise to challenges for channel estimation. In this paper, we
investigate training-sequence design and parameter estimation
simplification techniques for OFDM with multiple transmit
antennas.
Training sequences are used in wireless communication sys-
tems to obtain initial estimation of channel parameters, timing,
and frequency offset. For multiple transmit antenna systems,
training sequences should be designed to decouple the inter-
antenna interference for channel estimation. A common con-
jecture is to use orthogonal sequences at different transmit an-
tennas. However, orthogonality is not sufficient for good pa-
Manuscript received November 18, 1999; revised July 24, 2000 and October
30, 2000; accepted August 10, 2000. The editor coordinating the review of this
paper and accepting it for publication is A. Czylwik.
The author is with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250 USA (e-mail:
liye@ece.gatech.edu).
Publisher Item Identifier S 1536-1276(02)00180-0.
1536–1276/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE
67
rameter estimation of dispersive fading channels. Instead, the
optimal training sequences for different training antennas are
shown to be local orthogonal, i.e., for any starting position they
are orthogonal over the minimum set of elements. Furthermore,
this also results in simplified channel estimation.
When OFDM systems are used for data transmission, pilot-
symbol-aided or decision-directed estimation must be used to
track channel variations. For systems with only one transmit an-
tenna, channel parameter estimation [6]–[11] has been success-
fully used to improve the performance. For systems with mul-
tiple transmit antennas, a channel estimator has been developed
in [5] by using the correlation of the channel parameters at dif-
ferent frequencies. However, it requires the inversion of a large
matrix to decouple the inter-antenna interference. Hence, a sim-
plified channel estimator is desired to reduce the complexity.
In this paper, we present two reduced-complexity channel es-
timation techniques for OFDM systems with multiple transmit
antennas: optimum training sequences and simplified estima-
tion. The first technique carefully selects the training sequences
to eliminate interantenna interference. The second greatly sim-
plifies the channel estimation at the expense of a negligible per-
formance degradation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
we briefly introduce OFDM systems with multiple transmit
antennas, discuss the channel model, and describe the basic
principle of the channel estimator. We then present optimum
training-sequence design in Section III. Next, in Section IV,
we introduce the simplified channel estimation and analyze its
performance. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the
new techniques by computer simulation in Section V.
II. MULTIPLE TRANSMIT ANTENNAS FOR OFDM IN MOBILE
CHANNELS
Before introducing the new techniques, we briefly describe
an OFDM system with multiple transmit antennas, the statistics
of mobile channels, and the principle of the original estimator
developed in [5].
A. Transmit Diversity for OFDM Systems
An OFDM system with two transmit and two receive an-
tennas is shown in Fig. 1. Though the figure emphasizes transmit
diversity, the techniques developed in this paper can be directly
applied to any OFDM system with multiple transmit antennas.
At time , a data block is trans-
formed into two different signals
at the transmit diversity processor, where , ,
and are the number of subchannels of the OFDM systems, sub-
channel (or tone) index, and antenna index, respectively. Each of
68 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2002

Fig. 1. Transmit diversity for OFDM.

these signals forms an OFDM block. The transmit antennas si- where
multaneously transmit OFDM signals modulated by for
. For space-time-coding-based transmit diversity [5],
the transmit diversity processor is a space-time encoder, while
it may include an error-correction encoder and a permutation For OFDM systems with proper cyclic extension and timing, it
operation if permutation diversity [3] is used. can be shown in [5], [9] that with tolerable leakage, the channel
At the receiver, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the frequency response can be expressed as
received signal at each receive antenna is the superposition of
two distorted transmitted signals. The received signal at the th (4)
receive antenna can be expressed as
(1) where and
. , , and in the above
where denotes the channel frequency response expression are the block length, symbol duration, and tone
at the th tone of the th OFDM block, corresponding to spacing, respectively. They are related by
the th transmit and the th receive antenna. The statistical and , where is the duration of the cyclic
characteristics of wireless channels are briefly described in extension. In (4), ’s, for , are WSS
Section II-B. denotes the additive complex Gaussian narrow-band complex Gaussian processes. is the number of
noise on the th receive antenna and is assumed to be zero nonzero taps of the channel impulse response sampled at a rate
mean with variance . The noise is uncorrelated for different of . The average power of and ( ) depend
’s, ’s, or ’s. on the delay profiles of the wireless channels. If an OFDM
To achieve transmit diversity gain and detect the transmitted system is reasonably designed, then is
signal, channel state information is needed. In [5], we developed less than, but very close to .
a channel estimator by exploiting the time- and frequency-do- C. Basic Principle of Channel Estimation
main correlations of the channel parameters. After describing
the channel statistics in Section II-B, we summarize the prin- For an OFDM system with multiple transmit antennas, every
ciple of the estimator in Section II-C. tone at each receive antenna is associated with multiple channel
parameters, which makes the channel estimation difficult. For-
B. Channel Statistics tunately, channel parameters for different tones of each channel
are correlated and a channel estimator has been developed in [5]
The complex baseband representation of the mobile wireless
based on this correlation.
channel impulse response can be described by [12]
Following(4), the frequency response at the th tone of the
(2) th block corresponding to the th transmit antenna can be ex-
pressed as1
where is the delay of the th path is the corresponding
complex amplitude is the shaping pulse whose frequency (5)
response is usually a square-root raised-cosine Nyquist filter.
Due to the motion of the vehicle, ’s are wide-sense
stationary (WSS) narrow-band complex Gaussian processes, Hence, to obtain , we only need to estimate .
which are independent for different paths. From the previous section, the signal from each receive an-
From (2), the frequency response at time is tenna can be expressed as

(6)

(3) 1The index j for different receive antennas is omitted from H [n; k] ,
r [n; k] and w [n; k].
LI: SIMPLIFIED CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE TRANSMIT ANTENNAS 69

for and all . If the transmitted signals To find with and , it is suffi-
’s, for are known,2 , the temporal esti- cient to find for since only
mation of , can be found by [5] consists of ’s for , where if .
Note that is the DFT of . Therefore,
(7) there is no with such that for all
’s since it will result in and so ,
or for all .
Let
(8)
(10)
where is the temporal estimation of channel parameter for some with . Then it can be directly
vector, defined as checked that

(11)
and , , and are definded as
Equation (11) implies that for .
and Therefore, and .
In general, for systems with the number of transmit antennas,
, less than or equal to , let

(12)

for , where and denotes

the largest integer no larger than . Then for any
(9)
respectively.
From (8), we can see that a matrix inversion is
required to get the temporal estimation of . In order to re-
duce the computational complexity, the significant-tap-catching
(STC) estimator has been proposed in [5]. However, it is still
very complicated.

III. OPTIMUM TRAINING SEQUENCES

In this section, we investigate the optimum training sequences
for channel estimation in OFDM with multiple transmit an- (13)
tennas. For simplicity, we assume that the modulation results in
a constant-modulus signal. However, with only minor modifica- Note that ; therefore
tion, the results discussed here are applicable to any modulation
format. (14)
For constant-modulus modulation, and from (9)
and

(15)
for any , where denotes the unit impulse function. Con-
sequently, , where is a identify ma- Consequently, for or
trix. If the training sequences, ’s, are chosen such that (equivalent to ), which results in
for , then, from (8), for all . If , .
and no matrix inversion is required for channel estimation. The Hence, for all .
questions are if such a sequence exists and how the training se- It should be indicated that the above optimum training-se-
quence affects the performance of the channel estimation. To quence design approach is not applicable to those systems with
answer these questions, we first construct the training sequences .
and then demonstrate that the constructed training sequences ac- Fig. 2 shows how an optimum training sequence works for an
tually make the channel estimation attain the best performance. OFDM system with four transmit antennas. The OFDM system
Let ’s for be any training sequence has 128 tones and the length of the channel impulse responses
at training time that is good for timing and frequency syn- corresponding to all transmit antennas is less than 32, as shown
chronization and possibly other properties in OFDM systems. in Fig. 2(a). Then, in (12) and ’s for
are shown as in Fig. 2(b). As indicated before
2During the training period, the transmitted signals for each antenna are
known. When the system is in data transmission mode, decoded data are used
to generate the reference signals. (16)
70 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2002

(a)

(b)
Fig. 2. OFDM with optimum training sequence. (a) jh [n; l]j ’s. (b) p [n; l] ’s.

for and . Furthermore From [5], only when for , the estimator
attains its lower MSE bound. Therefore, the optimum training
sequences can also make the estimator achieve the best perfor-
(17) mance.
We have presented the optimum sequence design for the
training period of the decision-directed channel estimation.
for and . Therefore, by carefully The above discussion can be easily extended to pilot sequence
selecting the relative phases between the training sequences for design for pilot-symbol-aided channel estimation or channel
different transmit antennas, the effect of the channels corre- estimation in single carrier systems. For pilot-symbol-aided
sponding to different transmit antennas on is shifted to channel estimation in OFDM systems [6], [11] with the pilot
different regions, so the parameters for different channels can tones scattered into different times and frequencies, the pilot
be easily estimated without using any matrix inversion. sequences are two-dimensional (2-D). The optimum sequence
LI: SIMPLIFIED CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE TRANSMIT ANTENNAS 71

Fig. 3. Simplified channel estimator for transmit diversity.

design strategy described above can be directly used there. From the above equations, if is known, then can be
Furthermore, it is more flexible in this case since the relative estimated without any matrix inversion. However, neither
phases of the pilot sequences for different transmit antennas or is known.
can be shifted in a 2-D plane. Denote ’s for the robust estimation of channel
parameter vectors at time , i.e.,
IV. SIMPLIFIED CHANNEL ESTIMATION
In the previous section, we introduced optimum training-se-
quence design for decision-directed channel estimation for
OFDM systems with multiple transmit antennas. Using the where ’s ( ) are the coefficients of the robust channel
optimum training sequences, the temporal channel estimation estimator [5], [9] and their Fourier transform denoted by .
during the training period can be simplified and can achieve If robust estimation of channel parameter vectors at time ,
the best performance. However, when the systems are in the , and are used to substitute and
data transmission mode, the transmitted signals ’s at in the right sides of (18), then
different transmit antennas are determined by the random data
to be transmitted; therefore, their relative phases cannot be
chosen using the above technique. Hence, some simplification
technique is desired to reduce the complexity of channel pa-
(19)
rameter estimation for OFDM with multiple transmit antennas.

A. Algorithm The substitution reduces the computational complexity of the

Here, we develop simplified channel-estimation algorithm.
Though we discuss OFDM systems with only two transmit an-
tennas, the proposed algorithm can be easily extended to those
OFDM systems with over two transmit antennas.
From (7), we can see that
From the discussion in the previous section, for systems with
constant modulus modulation, and,
therefore
(18)
channel estimation. However, it may also cause some perfor-
mance degradation but, from the following analysis and com-
puter simulation, the performance degradation is negligible.
The simplified channel estimation with optimum training se-
quence is shown in Fig. 3 and summarized in Table I.
The STC and the estimation enhancing techniques developed
in [5] can be also used together with the simplified estimation
described here to further reduce the complexity and improve the
performance.
B. Performance Analysis
Here, we analyze the performance of the simplified channel
estimation. In particular, we investigate the mean-square error
(MSE) of the temporal estimation for simplified channel esti-
mator.
72 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2002

TABLE I
SIMPLIFIED CHANNEL-ESTIMATION ALGORITHM

Note that if satisfies the optimum training-sequence (a)

condition in Section III, i.e., , then from [5] both the
original and the simplified channel estimators are the same and
both attain the same best performance bound

MSE (20)

When the system is in the data transmission mode, ’s

are random variables, which are assumed to be independent for
different ’s, ’s, and ’s. Based on this assumption, we have

for . On the other hand, from [5]

(b)
Fig. 4. Performance comparison of the simplified and the original estimator
for the TU channels with (a) f=40 Hz and (b) f = 200 Hz, respectively.

where the vector represents the effect of the addi- It is shown in the Appendix that the MSE of the temporal
tive Gaussian noise, whose elements are independent identically estimation is
distributed complex Gaussian random variables with zero mean
and variance . Therefore, (19) becomes
MSE

MSE (23)

where MSE is the MSE of robust channel estimation that ex-

(21) ploits both the time- and frequency-domain correlations
and is the Doppler frequency of the channel. MSE
in the above is caused by using the noisy estimated pa-
Since both and are zero mean rameters in the previous symbol duration in simplified channel
estimation. Usually, MSE is much less than the noise level
(MSE ) and, therefore, compared with the original es-
(22)
timation; the performance degradation of the simplified estima-
tion is negligible when the square of normalized Doppler fre-
Therefore, the simplified temporal estimation is an unbiased es- quency is much less than the noise power ( ). Further-
timator. more, the simplified estimator does not require a large matrix
LI: SIMPLIFIED CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE TRANSMIT ANTENNAS 73

inversion and, therefore, it has lower complexity and also is nu-

merically stable.

V. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION BY COMPUTER SIMULATION

To demonstrate the performance of the simplified channel

estimation, computer simulations have been conducted for the
space-time coding based tracnsmit diversity. Before presenting
the simulation results, we first describe the parameters of the
simulated OFDM systems.

A. Parameters
Channels with the typical urban (TU) and hilly terrain (HT)
delay profiles [12] and a Doppler frequency of 40 or 200 Hz are
used to represent different mobile environments. Two transmit (a)
and two receive antennas are used for diversity. The links be-
tween different transmit or receive antennas are independent.
However, they have the same global statistics.
The system parameters are the same as those in [3] and [5].
The entire channel bandwidth, 800 kHz, is divided into 128 sub-
channels. The four subchannels on each end are used as guard
tones and the rest (120 tones) are used to transmit data. To
make the tones orthogonal to each other, the symbol duration
is chosen to be 160 s. An additional 40 s guard interval is
used to provide protection from intersymbol interference caused
by channel multipath delay spread. This results in a total block
length s and a subchannel symbol rate K
symbols/s.
A 16-state space-time code [14] with 4 PSK is used in the
system. Each data block, containing 236 bits, is coded into two
different blocks, each of which has exactly 120 symbols to form
an OFDM block. The channel parameter estimation approaches (b)
developed in this paper are used to provide estimated param-
Fig. 5. Performance comparison of the simplified and the original estimator
eters for decoding. Overall, the described system can transmit for the HT channels with (a) f=40 Hz and (b) f = 200 Hz, respectively.
data at a rate of 1.18 Mbits/s over an 800–kHz channel, i.e., the
transmission efficiency is 1.475 bits/s/Hz.
gap for the systems using the ideal and the estimated channel
parameters, which implies there is still room for improving the
B. Simulation Results
performance of the OFDM systems by improving the accuracy
The system performance is measured by the word error rate of the channel estimation.
(WER), which is averaged over 10 000 OFDM blocks. Figs. 4
and 5 show WER versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the
simplified and the original seven-tap STC estimators for the
TU and the HT channels, respectively. From Figs. 4 and 5, the VI. CONCLUSION
simplified estimators almost have the same performance as the
corresponding original estimators for channels with different Channel parameter estimation is an important task in OFDM
delay profiles and Doppler frequencies, even though the simpli- systems. In this paper, we have presented criteria for optimum
fied estimators have much a lower complexity. In particular, for training-sequence design for OFDM systems with multiple
both the TU and HT channels with a lower Doppler frequency transmit antennas and have also simplified the channel param-
( Hz), the required SNR for a 10% WER is about eter estimators developed previously. Using the design criteria,
8.5 dB for the simplified and original enhanced and nonen- we can construct training sequences that not only optimize, but
hanced estimators. As the Doppler frequency increases, the per- also simplify the channel estimation during the training period.
formance gap between the enhanced and nonenhanced estima- The simplified estimator has similar performance to that in [5],
tors increases. When Hz, the enhanced estimators but with much lower complexity. The techniques proposed here
have about a 1.5-dB SNR improvement for the TU channel and can be used in OFDM with multiple transmit-and-receive an-
a 1.2-dB SNR improvement for the HT channel over the nonen- tennas for diversity or multiple input/multiple output (MIMO)
hanced estimators. However, there is still a 3.5- to 4-dB SNR systems for high-rate wireless data access.
74 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2002

APPENDIX
MSE BOUND OF THE SIMPLIFIED ESTIMATION
The MSE of the temporal estimation is

MSE

(A1)

(A4)
In this appendix, we will evaluate the three terms in the above
inequality.
where . The last inequality in the above derivation
To evaluate the first term, a useful statistical property of is demonstrated in [15].
has to be introduced. From the statistical assumptions
Similar to the derivation of the first term, we can show that
on
the second term is

MSE (A5)

where MSE is the MSE of the channel estimators that exploits

the time- and frequency-domain correlations. It can be directly
checked that

(A6)

Hence

MSE MSE (A7)

The above identity implies that
are uncorrelated. Since
mitted signals, they are independent of
Therefore
(A2)
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
’s for different ’s or ’s The author would like to thank N. R. Sollenberger and L. J.
’s are determined by the trans- Cimini for their insightful comments.
’s and
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75
Ye (Geoffrey) Li (S’93–M’95–SM’97) was born
in Jiangsu, China. He received the B.S.E. and
M.S.E. degrees from the Department of Wireless
Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology,
Nanjing, China, in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and
the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, in
1994 .
From 1986 to 1991, he was a Teaching Assistant
and then a Lecturer with Southeast University, Nan-
jing, China. From 1991 to 1994, he was a Research
and Teaching Assistant with Auburn University. From 1994 to 1996, he was a
Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the University of Maryland at College
Park. From 1996 to 2000, he was with AT&T Laboratories-Research, Red Bank,
NJ. Since August 2000, he has been an Associate Professor with the School of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.
His current research interests include statistical signal processing and wireless
mobile systems with an emphasis on signal processing in communications.
Dr. Li was a Guest Editor for special issues of SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR
WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS for the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS
IN COMMUNICATIONS and is currently serving as an Editor for WIRELESS
COMMUNICATION THEORY for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS.