Decision-directed channel estimation for M-QAM-modulated OFDM systems

When decision-directed channel estimation is used for QAM-OFDM systems, the optimal shape of the two-dimensional filter depends on the amplitudes of the modulated symbols as well as the channel characteristics such as delay spread, Doppler frequency, and signal-to-noise ratio. While most conventional channel estimation methods did not consider the amplitudes of the modulated symbols because of large computational complexity, we propose a simple channel estimation method for multi-level-amplitude-modulated systems. The proposed method can effectively reduce the noise variance of the estimates with small-sized filtering and there is a possibility of reducing the implementation cost and producing better results by avoiding unnecessarily large biased term.