Compressive Sensing-Based Pilot Design for Sparse Channel Estimation in OFDM Systems

We consider the deterministic pilot design problem for sparse channel estimation in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. Our design is based on minimizing the coherence measure of the Fourier submatrix associated with the pilot subcarriers. This is done by optimizing over both pilot locations and pilot powers. As finding such global minimizer is a combinatorial problem, we resort to a greedy pilot allocation method. The resulting method achieves a suboptimal solution in a sequential manner and with reasonable computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs similar to the existing methods with significantly lower computational complexity.