This thesis proposes an overhead reduction scheme via pilot pattern re-design in distributed space-time block coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DSTBC-OFDM) systems. The DSTBC-OFDM is a cooperative technique using the Alamouti’s trans...
This thesis proposes an overhead reduction scheme via pilot pattern re-design in distributed space-time block coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DSTBC-OFDM) systems. The DSTBC-OFDM is a cooperative technique using the Alamouti’s transmitter diversity among spatially dispersed terminals in multipath fading channels in order to improve bit error rate (BER) performance. Since most researches, however, deal with the DSTBC-OFDM systems under the assumption of perfect channel state information (CSI), the throughput degradation due to the pilot symbols and the effect of the channel estimation errors have not been considered deeply.In this thesis, DSTBC-OFDM system with a pair of a pilot symbol and a null symbol is investigated as a practical DSTBC-OFDM model considering realistic channel estimation. Moreover, an overhead reduction scheme (ORS) is proposed when the CSI between PS (Primary Souce) and Destination is better than that between SS and Destination. The ORS performs the pilot pattern redesign according to the minimum pilot spacing criterion, which is based on the frequency-domain sampling theorem, in PS. The minimum pilot spacing information gets by RTS-CTS (Request to Send-Clear to Send) protocols i.e. SS or PS transmits RTS to Destination and Destination transmits CTS included minimum pilot spacing information to SS or PS after estimates channel by RTS. Then, SS or PS redesigns pilot pattern as to received minimum pilot spacing information.The minimum pilot spacing criterion and the normalized effective throughput (NET) via the ORS are derived as closed-form expressions. Simulation results show that the proposed ORS gives more than 0.3 bits/subcarrier NET compared with a conventional scheme while keeping the similar BER performance to the conventional one and low complexity LMMSE by reduced pilot subcarrier (channel estimate complexity of PS-Destination link).