On the Capacity of Frequency-Selective Channels in Training-Based Transmission Schemes

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Communication systems transmitting over frequency-selective channels generally employ an equalizer to recover the transmitted sequence corrupted by intersymbol interference (ISI). Most practical systems use a training sequence to learn the channel impulse response and thereby design the equalizer. An important issue is determining the optimal amount of training: too little training and the channel is not learned properly, too much training and there is not enough time available to transmit data before the channel changes and must be learned anew. We use an information-theoretic approach to find the optimal parameters in training-based transmission schemes for channels described by a block-fading model. The optimal length of the training interval is found by maximizing a lower bound on the training-based channel capacity. When the transmitter is capable of providing two distinct transmission power levels (one for training and one for data transmission), the optimal length of the training interval is shown to be equal to the length of the channel. Further, we show that at high SNR, training-based schemes achieve the capacity of block-fading frequency selective channels, whereas at low SNR, they are highly suboptimal.