Design of Channel Estimation Filters for Pilot Channel based DS-CDMA Systems

Abstract

The accuracy of channel estimation significantly affects the performance of coherent receiver in a DS-CDMA system. The receiver performance can be improved if an appropriate channel estimation filter is used according to the channel condition. In this paper, we consider the design of channel estimation filters for pilot channel based DS-CDMA systems. When a moving average (MA) FIR filter is used as the channel estimation filter (CEF), the tap size is optimized by minimizing the mean squared error of the estimated channel impulse response. Finally, the analytic design is verified by computer simulation. Numerical results show that the optimum MA FIR CEF provides near optimum performance, i.e., quite similar to that with the use of Wiener filter.