Optimal design and placement of pilot symbols for channel estimation

The problem of designing and placing pilot symbols for the estimation of frequency-selective random channels is considered. The channel is assumed to be a block-fading model with finite impulse response (FIR). For both single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, under the assumption of independent and identical distributed channel taps, the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) on the mean square error (MSE) of semi-blind channel estimators is derived and minimized with respect to pilot symbols and their placement. It is shown that the optimal strategy is to place pilot symbols satisfying certain orthogonality condition in such a way that data and pilot symbols with higher power are in the middle of the packet. The results also indicate that the optimal pilot placements are independent of channel probability distribution. For constant modulus symbols, we show that the quasi-periodic placement and its generalization in the multiuser case turn out to be optimal. We further consider estimating channels with correlated taps and show that the previous placement strategy is also optimal among orthogonal pilot sequences.