Analysis of the Effect of Coherence Bandwidth on Leakage Suppression Methods for OFDM Channel Estimation

In this paper, we analyze the effect of the coherence bandwidth of wireless channels on leakage suppression methods for discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based channel estimation in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Virtual carriers in an OFDM symbol cause orthogonality loss in DFT-based channel estimation, which is referred to as the leakage problem. In order to solve the leakage problem, optimal and suboptimal methods have already been proposed. However, according to our analysis, the performance of these methods highly depends on the coherence bandwidth of wireless channels. If some of the estimated channel frequency responses are placed outside the coherence bandwidth, a channel estimation error occurs and the entire performance worsens in spite of a high signal-to-noise ratio.