Header Information Based Channel Estimation for Highly Modulated Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Transmissions in IEEE 802.11ad

Abstract

When a packet is transmitted using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in IEEE 802.11ad, channel frequency responses (CFR) cannot be fully estimated using the common preamble of a packet, because the bandwidth of the estimated CFR using the common preamble is narrower than that of the data-field of OFDM transmissions. This study presents a channel estimation method that can be practically applied for highly modulated OFDM transmissions in IEEE 802.11ad. To estimate frequency components of the CFR that cannot be estimated using the channel estimation field in the packet preamble, we utilize a regenerated header that is constructed from decoded header information. By comparing the received and regenerated headers, the CFR components that are insufficiently estimated are fully estimated. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, link-level simulations were conducted using the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) that shows the highest throughput among the MCSs for OFDM transmission in IEEE 802.11ad. The simulation results show that when the proposed method is used, the increase in the required signal-to-noise ratio for a 1% packet-error-rate is less than 2 dB.