An improved least squares (LS) channel estimation method based on CNN for OFDM systems

Least squares (LS) is a commonly used pilot-based channel estimation algorithm in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. This algorithm is simple and easy to implement because of its low computation complexity. However, it has poor performance, especially at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To solve this problem, an improved LS channel estimation method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed on the basis of analyzing the traditional LS channel estimation methods. A channel estimation compensated network is designed based on CNN, which can solve the problem of performance degradation of the mean square error (MSE) through the online and offline modules. By designing the input-output relations, training data set, and testing data set, a CNN network is iteratively trained to learn the relevant features of the channels, so that the traditional LS estimation value can be corrected to improve the accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance in bit error rate (BER) and MSE, compared with the traditional channel estimation methods.