An adaptive channel interpolator based on Kalman filter for LTE uplink in high doppler spread environments

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) systems will employ single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) for the uplink. Similar to the Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technology, SC-FDMA is sensitive to frequency offsets leading to intercarrier interference (ICI). In this paper, we propose a Kalman filter-based approach in order to mitigate ICI under high Doppler spread scenarios by tracking the variation of channel taps jointly in time domain for LTE uplink systems. Upon acquiring the estimates of channel taps from the Kalman tracker, we employ an interpolation algorithm based on polynomial fitting whose order is changed adaptively. The proposed method is evaluated under four different scenarios with different settings in order to reflect the impact of various critical parameters on the performance such as propagation environment, speed, and size of resource block (RB) assignments. Results are given along with discussions.