Effect of inter-block-interference-free region on compressed sensing based channel estimation in TDS-OFDM systems

Time domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) is the basis technology for digital television standard (DTV) employed in some countries thanks to its high spectral efficiency when compared to traditional cyclic prefix OFDM. Moreover, it does not require pilot usage in frequency domain channel estimation. Instead of data usage as cyclic prefix, pseudo-noise (PN) sequences are transmitted in guard intervals. Due to interference from the previous OFDM data symbol, the received signal in guard interval can be decomposed into a small-sized signal that contains only PN sequences utilizing the inter-block-interference (IBI)-free region in the convolution matrix. Due to sparsity, multipath fading channel can be obtained by the application of compressed sensing (CS) technique to reconstruct the high-dimensional sparse channel from the decreased-size of received signal through the known PN sequence matrix. In this study, the effect of the size of IBI-free region on CS and Bayesian CS (BCS) based channel estimation is investigated. Accordingly, reconstruction error performances of basis pursuit (BP) and BCS are compared. Simulation results show that the channel estimation can be improved by trading-off the length of the IBI-free region. However, an increase in IBI-free region leads to decreased energy efficiency at both the transmitter and receiver side.