Biased estimators with adaptive shrinkage targets for orthogonal frequency division multiple access channel estimation

In orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based systems where channel frequency response (CFR) estimation has to be carried out using only the user-specific (localised) pilots within a small time frequency block, the accuracy of the estimates suffer because of the limited number of pilots and imperfect knowledge of the channel statistics. A biased estimator is proposed for the estimation of CFR over the time frequency block. Hypothesis tests are designed to ascertain the time and frequency selectivity of the CFR within the region of interest, and the outcome of these tests are used to determine a vector shrinkage target for the biased estimator. Simulation results indicate that the performance of the proposed estimator is comparable to that of the optimal minimum mean square error estimator, even though it does not have any knowledge of the channel statistics. © 2013 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.