Improvement of LTE Downlink Channel Estimation Performance by Using an Adaptive Pilot Pattern

This paper proposes an adaptive pilot pattern to improve channel estimation performance for LTE downlink system with high mobility. The downlink pilot positions are predefined in the time and frequency domain with fixed pilot pattern in LTE standard. However, that pilot structure is not efficient in a fast time varying channel, and leads to a decrease of channel estimation performance. The authors propose and evaluate the performance of LTE downlink channel estimation using an adaptive pilot scheme to optimally use pilot tones over time varying channels. It is shown that only seven bits of additional wide-band feedback per frame and per user are required to optimally support adaptive pilot pattern. Simulation results show that the proposed method allows high performance in terms of throughput and channel estimation error. This analysis shows that LTE downlink throughput could be increased over 4%.