Packet scheduling in the presence of channel estimation error in multi-user OFDM wireless systems

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effect of channel estimation error on the performance of channel aware techniques in a packet-based multi-user OFDM wireless system. To this end, we consider the use of two channel estimation schemes; one is a simple linear and the other is an optimum Wiener-type channel estimator. We examine the effect of channel impulse response (CIR) estimation error on coherent reception and the effect of signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) estimation error on channel aware transmission techniques (e.g., packet scheduling). It is shown that the performance of coherent reception is relatively less susceptible to the CIR estimation error, but the performance of channel aware schemes can be very sensitive to the SINR estimation error. To alleviate this problem, we propose a robust scheduling scheme which can work without significant performance degradation even in the presence of large channel estimation error. Finally, we verify the performance of the proposed scheduling scheme by computer simulation.