An analysis of pilot symbol assisted modulation for Rayleigh fading channels (mobile radio)

Abstract

The author presents pilot-symbol-assisted modulation (PSAM) on a solid analytical basis, a feature missing from previous work. Closed-form expressions are presented for the bit error rate (BER) in binary-phase-shift-keying (BPSK) and in quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK), for a tight upper bound on the symbol error rate in 16 quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16-QAM), and for the optimized receiver coefficients. The error rates obtained are lower than for differential detection for any combination of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and Doppler spread, and the performance is within 1 dB of a perfect reference system under slow-fading conditions and within 3 dB when the Doppler spread is 5% of the symbol rate.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>