Pilot Placement for Time-Varying MIMO OFDM Channels with Virtual Subcarriers

The rapid time-variation of a fading multipath environment can impair the performance of multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO OFDM). This paper proposes a pilot placement method for MIMO OFDM systems under time-varying channels with the guard band. The time-varying channel is described by complex exponential basis expansion model (BEM). We discuss the least square (LS) channel estimation to obtain the minimum mean square error (MSE) and derive the pilot allocation that can satisfy the minimum MSE with regard to guard band in time-varying channels. It is shown that optimal pilot clusters can distribute non-uniformly in frequency domain and minimize the MSE. We generalize our scheme over G OFDM symbols and compare it with comb pilots. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach is more effective than previous work. Simulation results validate our theoretical analysis.