Symbol-Level Selective Channel Estimation in Packet-Based OFDM Systems

Wireless access in vehicular environments to support wireless communication between vehicles has been developed to provide road safety and infotainment services. In vehicular environments where the channel changes rapidly, channel estimation is very important in improving the reliability of wireless communication. Therefore, numerous channel estimation schemes have been proposed; however, none of the schemes proposed so far can perform well over the entire signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. In this paper, we propose a novel channel estimation scheme that selectively uses the better scheme between two channel estimation schemes on a symbol-by-symbol basis. The results show that the proposed scheme performs symbol-by-symbol selection of the better channel estimation scheme within a packet, and thus shows excellent performance over the entire SNR region in vehicular environments in terms of the bit error rate and packet error rate.