IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 12, NO.
9, SEPTEMBER 2008
Hidden Pilot Based Precoder Design for MIMO-OFDM Systems
Byung Wook Kim, Student Member, IEEE, Sung-Yoon Jung, Joontae Kim, Student Member, IEEE,
and Dong-Jo Park, Member, IEEE
Abstract—In order to improve bandwidth efficiency and bit
error rate (BER) performance, a new hidden pilot scheme using a
precoder is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. We
show that the inevitable data interference of the hidden pilot,
which degrades the performance of channel estimation, can be
reduced successfully by the precoder design for each antenna
with the aid of an iterative scheme. We also show that frequency
diversity gain can be achieved due to the spreading effect of
the precoder. Computer simulations are presented in which the
proposed scheme is compared with conventional methods with
respect to channel estimation, BER and bandwidth efficiency.
Index Terms—MIMO-OFDM, precoder, bandwidth efficiency,
hidden pilot.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I N MIMO-OFDM systems, a pilot-symbol-aided modula-
tion (PSAM) scheme can be used to track channel state
information (CSI) using pilot symbols that are known a priori
at the receiver [1]. Although accurate channel estimates can be
obtained if the pilots are judiciously placed [2], this method
wastes bandwidth, which is precious in wireless communica-
tions. Blind channel estimation [3] offers a bandwidth-efficient
method that uses statistical and other properties of the data.
However, this method also has inherent shortcomings, such as
slow convergence and phase ambiguity. An alternative method
is the superimposed training (ST) scheme [4], [5] in which
pilot symbols are added to the data symbols. This scheme has
the virtue of no loss in the information rate at the expense
of data power, because some of the transmitted energy is
allocated to the hidden pilots.
In most existing ST schemes, the effect of unknown data
degrades the performance of channel estimation. To solve
this problem, we propose a new hidden pilot scheme using a
precoder that successively removes the inevitable interference
that is caused by unknown data, with the aid of an iterative
scheme. In addition, with the help of the spreading effect of
the information data over the total available bandwidth using
the precoder, it is possible to provide high frequency diversity.
Notation: F1 is an N × N discrete Fourier transform (DFT)
matrix and F2 is an N/MT × N/MT DFT matrix. The
covariance matrix of g is denoted by Rg , which is E[ggH ].
Manuscript received April 30, 2008. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this letter and approving it for publication was P. Cotae.
B. W. Kim, J. Kim, and D.-J. Park are with the School of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology (KAIST), 335 Gwahangno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-701, Re-
public of Korea (e-mail: {byungwook.kim, joontae.kim, djpark}@kaist.ac.kr).
S.-Y. Jung is with the Telecommunication R & D Center, Samsung
Electronics Co., Ltd., Dong Suwon P.O. Box 105, 416, Maetan-3dong,
Yeongtong-gu, Suwon-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea 443-742 (e-mail:
sungyoon.jung@samsung.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2008.080681.
1089-7798/08$25.00 
c 2008 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Downloaded on August 4, 2009 at 10:56 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
657
II. P ROPOSED H IDDEN P ILOT D ESIGN
Consider a MIMO-OFDM system with MT transmit anten-
nas and MR receive antennas. Let N be the total number of
subcarriers. We assume that the channel is time-invariant over
a single symbol block, but it could vary across blocks. The
length of the cyclic prefix L is set equal to the number of taps
of the channel impulse response. At the i-th receive antenna,
we can obtain an N × 1 vector ri , which can be written as
MT

ri = D(h̃ji )xj + ni , i = 1, 2, . . ., MR , (1)
j=1
where xj is an N × 1 precoded transmit symbol block from
the j-th transmit antenna, D(h̃ji ) is an N × N diagonal
channel matrix with principal diagonal components that are
the elements of h̃ji , which is the frequency response of the
time-domain channel hji . We assume that ni is additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN), with covariance of σn2 I.
To mitigate the inevitable interference that is caused by un-
known data in the hidden pilot scheme, a precoder that is based
on orthogonal polyphase sequences [6], which have good
periodic autocorrelation and crosscorrelation properties, is
exploited. These properties are used to eliminate interference
between data and the hidden pilot, thus guaranteeing almost
no loss in the transmission data rate when the total number
of subcarriers is large. Generating the N/MT − 1 numbers of
polyphase sequence sets such that C = [c0 , c1 , . . ., cN/MT −2 ]
[6], we can design the precoder matrix P and the pilot vector
t as follows:
P = F2 · [c 0 , c 1 , . . ., c N/MT −3 ]
(2)
t = F2 · c N/MT −2 ,
where c = [cT , 0]T is an N/MT × 1 vector.
To support the orthogonality of pilot signals, used to esti-
mate MIMO-OFDM channels, from the different antennas, we
consider disjoint sets of tones that include or do not include
the hidden pilot in each MIMO-OFDM symbol. We design
the transmit symbol block xj as
MT

xj = Uj (Psjj + t) + Uk (Psjk ), (3)
k=1,k=j
where Uk is the N × N/MT subcarrier mapping matrix and
sjk = UH k sj , where sj is an information data block from
the j-th transmit antenna. Uk consists of 0 or 1 and has the
following conditions:

IN/MT , if k = j
UHk Uj = (4)
0N/MT , if k = j.
It is clear from (3) that the proposed design of the hidden
pilot results in good bandwidth efficiency because we can
 658 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 12, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2008

allocate information data to all OFDM subcarriers and pilots where tr[·] is a trace operator. In fact, B shows good periodic
are simply added to certain subcarriers determined by Uk autocorrelation in the proposed scheme, i.e., BH B → cI
in order to estimate MIMO-OFDM channels. In addition, where c is a certain constant. Note that the minimum channel
all information data symbol blocks are spread using the MSE can be achieved in (8) when this feature is satisfied [7].
proposed precoder over the available subcarriers, which results Therefore, we can obtain good channel estimates using the
in enhanced performance with respect to BER. proposed precoder and hidden pilot.
At the receiver, the N/MT × 1 vector ri(j) is selected by
multiplying UH j to (1) for channel identification and symbol IV. S YMBOL D ETECTION
detection, which is given by
With the channel estimated from the previous section, we
ri(j) = D(h̃ji(j) )(Psjj + t)
can obtain r̄i(j) , subtracting D̂(h̃ji(j) )t from (5), shown as
MT
 (5)
+ D(h̃qi(j) )(Psqj ) + ni(j) , MT

q=1,q=j r̄i(j) = D̂(h̃qi(j) )Psqj + η i(j) , (9)
q=1
where D(h̃ji(j) ) is the N/MT × N/MT diagonal channel
matrix. where
III. C HANNEL E STIMATION MT

 
η i(j) = D(h̃ji(j) )t + D(h̃qi(j) )Psqj +ni(j) . (10)
At the receiver, channels can be estimated by preprocessing
q=1
the received signal using the properties of the designed pre-
coder and hidden pilot in order to reduce interference between 
D̂(h̃ji(j) ) and D(h̃ji(j) ) denote the diagonal matrix with main
data and the hidden pilot. Thus, the interference vi(j) , which 

consists of data symbols, is suppressed as diagonals of ĥji and hji . Given that we are considering an
MT × MR antenna system, we can combine MR received
yi(j) = BH F2 H ri(j)
signal vectors into one signal vector, that is,
= BH Hji(j) b + BH FH
2 ni(j)
MT
 r̄j = H j s j +η  j , (11)
H H
+ B Hji(j) Asjj + B Hqi(j) Asjq
q=1,q=j (6) where r j = [rT1(j) , . . ., rTMR (j) ]T , s j = [sT1(j) , . . ., sTMT (j) ]T ,
    T
vi(j) η  k = η T1(j) , . . ., η TMR (j) and
= B Bhji + vi(j) +wi(j) = BH Bhji +zi(j) ,
H
   H j =
zi(j) ⎡ ⎤
D̂(h̃11(j) )P D̂(h̃21(j) )P ··· D̂(h̃MT 1(j) )P
where A = FH H
2 P, b = F2 t, B is an N/MT × L circulant ⎢ D̂(h̃12(j) )P D̂(h̃22(j) )P ··· D̂(h̃MT 2(j) )P ⎥
⎢ ⎥
matrix with the first column b, Hji(j) is an N/MT × N/MT ⎢ .. .. .. .. ⎥
 T ⎣ . . . . ⎦
circulant matrix with the first column hTji , 0, . . ., 0 , and
D̂(h̃1MR (j) )P D̂(h̃2MR (j) )P · · ·
D̂(h̃MT MR (j) )P
wi(j) is a modified noise vector, i.e., wi(j) = BH FH 2 ni(j) . (12)
We have used the fact that Hji(j) b = Bhji due to the
Then, data detection using linear MMSE is presented as
commutativity of circular convolution. If we let Aq be a
 −1
column-wise circulant matrix with the q-th column of A as the  Ps H Ps  H
first column, which we denote as aq , Hji(j) aq is equivalent ŝj = H H j H j + Rη j  r j ,
N/MT − 2 j N/MT − 2
N/M
T −2 H (13)
to Aq hji . Then, BH Hji(j) A = B Aq hji . Given where Ps is the information data symbol power in one block.
q=1
that the polyphase sequence has good periodic crosscorrelation Here, we can additionally suppress the residual of data inter-
property, which satisfies the condition that BH Aq approaches ference by using an iterative algorithm that reduces vi(j) with
0 for all q, we can effectively remove the data interference the help of the detected symbol and the estimated channel.
vi(j) that hinders channel estimation. Thus, we can estimate Performing the iterative algorithm, the new preprocessed data
(k+1)
the time-domain channel using the linear MMSE channel block y i(j) at the (k + 1)-th iteration can be written as
estimator given by
MT

H −1
ĥji = Rhji BH B(B BRhji BH B + Rzi k ) yi(j) . (7) (k+1)
y i(j)
(k) (k)
= yi(j) − BH Ĥji(j) Aŝjj −
(k) (k) (k)
BH Ĥqi(j) Aŝjq ,
 q=1,q=j
Using the channel estimation error hji = hji − ĥji , the (14)
channel mean square error (MSE) can be expressed as (k)
where Ĥji(j) is an N/MT × N/MT circulant matrix with a
(k)T
 H
first column of [ĥji , 0, . . ., 0]T at the (k)-th iteration. The
2
σ = tr[E[h ji hji ]] iterative algorithm provides more accurate channel estimation,
h ji
−1
which leads to better BER performance. It was observed from
= tr[(R−1 H 2 H
hji + B B(Rvi k + σwi(j) B B)
−1 H
B B) ], numerical simulations that the algorithm converges rapidly
(8) within a few iterations.

Authorized licensed use limited to: VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Downloaded on August 4, 2009 at 10:56 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 KIM et al.: HIDDEN PILOT BASED PRECODER DESIGN FOR MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS 659

Channel Estimation Error Bandwidth Efficiency

0
10 1

proposed w/ iter.
proposed w/o iter. 0.95
proposed anaysis

Normalized Bandwidth Efficiency

−1
10 conventioanl ST
PSAM MMSE 0.9
Mean Square Error

0.85
−2 proposed
10
PSAM
0.8
ST

−3 0.75
10

0.7

−4
10 0.65
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Eb/No (SNR per bit) Eb/No (SNR per bit)

Fig. 1. Mean square error of channel estimates versus SNR. Fig. 3. Normalized bandwidth efficiency versus SNR.

0
10
BER Performance
channel. The proposed scheme outperforms the other schemes
whether the channel state information is known or not. We
−1
10 also observe that the proposed scheme performs slightly
better than the other schemes when the SNR is low. The
gap in performance increases as the SNR increases. This is
−2
10
Probability of Bit Error

−3
10
−4
10
proposed w/ iter.
proposed w/ iter. (CSI)
proposed w/o iter.
−5
10 proposed w/o iter. (CSI)
PSAM MMSE
PSAM MMSE (CSI)
−6
10 conventioanl ST
conventioanl ST (CSI)
−7
10
0 5 10 15
Eb/No (SNR per bit)
Fig. 2. Probability of bit error versus SNR.
V. S IMULATION R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
We compare the proposed scheme with both the con-
ventional superimposed training (ST) and pilot-symbol-aided
modulation (PSAM) schemes in a MIMO-OFDM system. In
the simulations, the total subcarrier number N is set to 512
and the number of antennas at each transmitter and receiver is
two. The channel is generated randomly at each Monte-Carlo
run and is assumed to be Rayleigh with a length L = 16.
The total transmitted power is normalized to 1 and the pilot
power ratio loaded to the hidden pilot is set to 0.7. For the
PSAM scheme, the number of the disjoint pilot symbols is set
to 32. The ST method uses a chirp sequence with a normalized
2 ing for frequency-selective blockfading channels,” IEEE Trans. Inform.
power of σchirp = 0.5. The total number of iterations is
fixed at 3. As shown in Fig. 1, the proposed hidden pilot
scheme performs better than the PSAM scheme with respect to
channel estimation when the SNR is low, because the proposed
scheme uses more pilots than PSAM. However, when the SNR
is high, the channel MSE of the proposed scheme is worse
because BH Aq → 0 is not perfectly satisfied, which results
in degraded channel estimation. Such residual interference can
be reduced by iteratively updating the detected symbols and
the estimated channel, as shown in Fig. 1.
Figure 2 displays the BER performance for three schemes
with respect to both the estimated channel and the known
because the proposed precoder spreads each symbol over the
frequency domain and achieves a high degree of frequency
diversity, which results in enhanced BER performance. A
comparison of the normalized bandwidth efficiency (NBE)
between the proposed scheme and the other schemes is shown
in Fig. 3. The proposed scheme wastes little bandwidth, while
the PSAM scheme uses pilot tones that degrade bandwidth
efficiency. Even though the conventional ST scheme does not
20 25 30 waste bandwidth, the NBE is worse than for the proposed
scheme due to the interference between data and the hidden
pilot.
We conclude that a new hidden-pilot-based precoding
scheme for the MIMO-OFDM systems not only spreads the
signal over the total available bandwidth, which results in fre-
quency diversity, but also maintains high bandwidth efficiency.
By carefully designing the precoder and hidden pilot with
the help of iteration, data interference caused by information
data can be canceled more efficiently, resulting in enhanced
performance.
R EFERENCES
[1] W. G. Jeon, K. H. Paik, and Y. S. Cho, “An efficient channel estimation
technique for OFDM systems with transmitter diversity,” in Proc. IEEE
Int. Symp. Pers., Indoor Mobile., vol. 2, pp. 1246–1250, Sept. 2000.
[2] S. Adireddy, L. Tong, and H. Viswanathan, “Optimal placement of train-
Theory, vol. 48, no. 8, pp. 2338–2352, Aug. 2002.
[3] H. Bolcskei, R. W. Heath, and A. J. Paulraj, “Blind channel identification
and equalization in OFDM based multiantenna systems,” IEEE Trans.
Signal Processing, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 96–109, Jan. 2002.
[4] M. Ghogho and A. Swami, “Improved channel estimation using super-
imposed training,” in Proc. SPAWC, pp. 110–114, July 2004.
[5] N. Chen and G. T. Zhou, “What is the price paid for superimposed
training in OFDM?” in Proc. ICASSP, vol. 4, pp. 421–424, May 2004.
[6] H. Luke, “Families of polyphase sequences with near-optimal two-valued
auto-and cross-correlation functions,” Electron. Lett., vol. 28, no. 1, Nov.
1992.
[7] R. A. Horn and C. R. Johnson, Matrix Analysis. Cambridge University
Press, 1990.

Authorized licensed use limited to: VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Downloaded on August 4, 2009 at 10:56 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.