Spectrally Efficient Pilot Structure and Channel Estimation for Multiuser FBMC Systems

In this paper, we consider channel estimation problem in the uplink of filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) systems. We propose a pilot structure and a joint multiuser channel estimation method for FBMC. Opposed to the available solutions in the literature, our proposed technique does not rely on the flat-channel condition over each subcarrier band or any requirement for placing guard symbols between different users' pilots. Our proposed pilot structure reduces the training overhead by interleaving the users' pilots in time and frequency. Thus, we can accommodate a larger number of training signals within the same bandwidth and improve the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, this pilot structure inherently leads to a reduced peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) compared with the solutions that use all the subcarriers for training. We analytically derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and mean square error (MSE) expressions for our proposed method. We show that these expressions are the same. This confirms the optimality of our proposed method, which is numerically evaluated through simulations. Relying on its improved spectral efficiency, our proposed method can serve a large number of users and relax pilot contamination problem in FBMC-based massive MIMO systems. This is corroborated through simulations in terms of sum-rate performance for both single cell and multicell scenarios.