ISSN (Print) : 0974-6846

Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 9(20), DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2016/v9i20/81485, May 2016 ISSN (Online) : 0974-5645

An Improved Compressed Sensing based Sparse

Channel Estimation for MIMO-OFDM Systems
with an Efficient Pilot Insertion Scheme
V. Nagendra Babu1*, V. Adinarayana1, K. Muralikrishna2 and P. Rajesh Kumar3
1
Department of ECE, Vignan’s Institute of Information Technology, Visakhapatnam - 530049, Andhra Pradesh, India;
nagendra4b8@gmail.com, joy.adi2011@gmail.com
2
Department of ECE, ANITS Engineering College, Visakhapatnam - 531162, Andhra Pradesh, India;
mkasi71@yahoo.com
3
Department of ECE, A.U College of Engineering, Andhra University,Visakhapatnam - 530003,
Andhra Pradesh, India; rajeshauce@gmail.com

Abstract
In this paper, we proposed an improved recovery algorithm, with efficient pilot placement, for Compressed Sensing
­(CS)-based sparse channel estimation based on Sparsity Adaptive Matching Pursuit (SAMP) in Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems. The proposed algorithm does not require a priori knowledge of
the sparsity, and to approach the true sparsity, adjusts the step size adaptively. Furthermore, estimation accuracy can be
­affected by different measurement matrices in CS, due to different pilot arrangements. It is known that, the Cyclic Difference
Set (CDS) is the optimal setoff pilot locations when the signal is sparse on the unitary Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT)
­matrix by minimizing the mutual coherence of the measurement matrix. Based on this, an efficient pilot insertion scheme
is introduced in cases where Cyclic Different Set does not exist. Simulation results in the paper show that the channel
estimation algorithm, with the new pilot placement scheme, which offers a better trade-off between the ­performances
in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and the complexity, when compared to previous estimation
algorithms.

Keywords: Compressed Sensing, Cyclic Difference Set, Sparse Channel Estimation, Sparsity Adaptive Matching Pursuit

1.  Introduction channel in OFDM systems. Conventional methods for

Due to its high data rate, efficient spectral utilization and
ability to cope with multipath fading, OFDM has been
widely using in various wireless communication stan-
dards, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE). Its application
in Underwater Acoustic (UWA) communications has
been exploited in recent years. In coherent digital wire-
less systems, it is critical to obtaining accurate estimates
of the Channel State Information (CSI) at the receiver.
The pilot tones will be inserted into certain subcarriers of
each OFDM symbol, or all subcarriers of OFDM symbols
are used as pilots within a specific period to estimate the
CSI estimation, such as Least Square (LS) and Minimum
Mean-Square (MMSE), lead to the excessive-utilization
of the spectral and energy resources and cannot exploit
the sparsity of the wireless channels. As opposed to the
traditional methods, channel estimation exploiting the
sparsity of the channels effectively improves the spectral
and energy efficiency by reducing the required number
of pilots.
Advances in the field of CS have gained a fast-growing
interest in signal processing and can be applied to sparse
channel estimation. Unlike previous channel estimation
methods, the accurate reconstruction of the signal which

*Author for correspondence

 An Improved Compressed Sensing based Sparse Channel Estimation for MIMO-OFDM Systems with an Efficient Pilot Insertion
Scheme
is sparse on a certain basis is possible by CS from a small
number of random linear projections/measurements. A
proper reconstruction algorithm and a properly designed
measurement matrix are essential for accurate or even
exact reconstruction of the target signal. Recently, a stage-
wise algorithm which uses different step sizes for different
stages, however as the change of step sizes depends on a
specific relation between the number of measurements
and the sparsity level.
We propose a channel estimation scheme, adaptive step
size SAMP (AS-SAMP) based on the SAMP algorithm,
which can achieve fast convergence by adjusting the step
size adaptively. The simulation results demonstrate the
better performance for channel estimation using the pro-
posed algorithm for sparse channel estimation in terms
of MSE and BER in UWA-OFDM. Moreover, the mutual
coherence of the measurement matrix is minimized by
providing a partial DFT measurement matrix; it is known
that if the pilot indices set are a Cyclic Difference Set
(CDS). However, it is not guaranteed that a CDS will exist
for every pilot size so we propose a novel pilot pattern
selection scheme which relies on the concatenated CDS
with an iterative tail search (C-CDS with TS). Because the
proposed design is deterministic, it is more efficient than
any other search-based methods.
We conduct a comparative analysis of the
­performance of existing reconstruction methods in
terms of estimation accuracy and computational com-
plexity. Furthermore, priori knowledge of sparsity is not
required in newly ­proposed reconstruction algorithm
for CS applications.
2. CS Fundamentals and System
Model
The following notation will be used for the rest of the
paper. XT denotes the transpose of X, X† denotes the
Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse matrix of X, which is
defined as (XH X)–1 XH, with XH as the Hermitian of X, ||
X || and || X ||1denotes the ℓ2 norm and the ℓ1 norm of X,
respectively.
2.1  CS Fundamentals
We consider a contaminated measurement vector
obtained through
Y = Фx + w, (1)
2 Vol 9 (20) | May 2016 | www.indjst.org
where x є RN is a real-valued, one-dimensional,
­discrete-time signal vector, Ф is the sensing matrix, and
w є RN is a stochastic error term. Assuming that x can be
expanded in an orthonormal basis ψ as
x = ψα,  (2)
where α is the N X 1coefficients vector, the signal x is
K-sparse if and only if K coefficients (K << N) in α are
non-zero while the remaining coefficients are zero or
­negligibly small. Substituting (2) in (1), one obtains
y = Фψα + w = Aα + w, (3)
where, A is referred to as the measurement matrix.
Essentially, CS states that x can be recovered, with high
probability, by solving the under-determined problem in
(3). The reliability of recovery depends on two constraints:
1) α is sparse; 2) A satisfies the restrict isometric property
(RIP), which means that for an arbitrary level δ є(0, 1)and
any index set I є {0, 1, ..., N − 1}such that |I| ≤ K, where
|є| denote the cardinality of the set, and for all α є R|N|, the
following relation holds:
(1 − δ) ||α||2 ≤ ||AIα||2 ≤ (1 + δ) ||α||2, (4)
where AI is the matrix containing the columns of which
the indices are elements of the set I. An estimator of α
in (3) can be achieved by solving a convex optimization
problem, which is formulated as,

a = arg min ||α||1, subject to ||y – Aα|| ≤ε, (5)
for a given ε >0. If A satisfies RIP and α is sufficiently
sparse, the norm of the reconstruction error is bounded

by || a – α|| ≤ Cє, where C depends on the RIP related
parameter δ of A rather than α. Particularly, if a measure-
ment matrix is composed of random rows in an N×N
DFT matrix, and if M > CбK log N, a K-sparse signal can
be reconstructed with probability of at least 1−O(N–б),
where δ is the constant in the RIP, and Cб is approximately
linear with δ.
2.2  System Model
We consider an N-subcarrier OFDM system in which P
subcarriers are used as pilots. The symbols transmitted on
the kth subcarrier, X(k), 0 ≤ k ≤ N −1, are assumed to be
independent and identically distributed random variables
drawn from a Phase-Shift Keying (PSK) or Quadrature
Amplitude Modulation (QAM) signal constellation.
Assume that the time-invariant multipath channel having
the impulse response
Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 V. Nagendra Babu, V. Adinarayana, K. Muralikrishna and P. Rajesh Kumar
∑
N p−1
h(n) = hp δ(n − hTp )  (6)
p=0
where, ηp is the number of paths, and ηp and Tp are the
amplitude gain and the delay associated with the pth path,
respectively. The vector of received signal after Discrete
Fourier Transforms (DFT) is expressed as
Y = XH + W = XDh +W, (7)
where, X is an N × N diagonal matrix with the elements
X(k), 0 ≤ k ≤ N − 1, on the main diagonal, Y = [Y(0),
Y(1),..., Y(N – 1)]T. H = [H(0), H(1),..., H(N – 1)]T and W
= [W(0), W(1),..., W(N – 1)]T are the frequency response
vector of the channel and additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN), respectively. h = [h(0), h(1),..., h(L – 1)]T. The
1 − j 2pmn/ N ,
(m, n) element of D is given by [D]m,n = e ,
N Algorithm 1 AS-SAMP
where 0 ≤ m ≤ N − 1 and 0 ≤ n ≤ L − 1. After extracting the
pilot subcarriers, we can write the following ­input-output
relationship
Yp = Xp Dp h + Wp = Ah + Wp, (8)
where, Yp = SY, Xp = SXST, Dp = SD, Wp = SW, and S is a P × N
matrix for selected pilot subcarriers. In addition, A = Xp Dp
is a P × L matrix, referred to as the measurement matrix. The
goal of CS-based channel estimation is to estimate h from
the received pilot Yp, given the m ­ easurement matrix A.
3. Proposed AS-SAMP with
Application to Sparse Channel
Estimation
3.1  Proposed AS-SAMP Algorithm
We propose the AS-SAMP algorithm; to expedite the
convergence, the algorithm begins with a larger step size
(the initial step size is denoted as SI) which is adaptively
decreased to provide fine tuning in later stages as the
change rate of the reconstructed signal’s energy decreases.
Consequently, an additional threshold Γ is used to specify
the beginning of the fine tuning. The pseudo code for the
proposed algorithm is presented as Algorithm 1. The
algorithm is also stage-wise with a variable size of FT in
different stages. During a stage, it adopts two correlation
tests iteratively, i.e., candidate and final tests, to search a
certain number of coordinate corresponding to the larg-
est correlation values between the signal residual and the
columns of the measurement matrix. Then, the algorithm
moves to the next stage until the recovered signal with the
Vol 9 (20) | May 2016 | www.indjst.org
least residual is found. As opposed to SAMP, the proposed
algorithm incorporates two threshold values into the
halting criterion: tolerance є and Γ. Therefore, AS-SAMP
halts when the residual’s norm is smaller than є, in which
є are set to be the noise energy. Meanwhile, sis decreased
when the energy difference of the reconstructed signal
falls below Γ. Starting with a sufficiently large initial step
size (SI ≤ K), the algorithm quickly approaches the target
signal. However, when the difference in the energy of the
reconstructed signals becomes smaller than the pre-set Γ,
the step size is reduced (by a factor of two) to avoid overes-
timation of the K-sparse target signal. This overestimation
can significantly degrade the accuracy of the algorithm.
Algorithm-1
Input: Received signal at pilot subcarriers Yp, ­measurement
matrix A, tolerance
 є, threshold Г, initial step size SI;
  1. Initialize h = [0,0,…,0]T, h old = [0,0,…,0]T, rtemp =
[0,0,…,0]T, indices set D0 = Ø, candidate support set
C0 = Ø,, residual r0 = Yp, size of final support set F0 =
Ø,, iteration index t = 1
  2.  while (||rt-1|| > є) do
  3.  Calculate signal SP = |AH r(t-1)|
  4. Select indices set Dt in A corresponding to the L
­largest elements in SP
   {Preliminary test}
  5. Merge chosen indices and final support set from
­previous iteration into candidate support set Ct = Dt
 Ft–1
  6. Refine candidate set to final set Ft by selecting indices
corresponding to the L
   largest elements of | AC t YP | {Final test}

  7. Solve the least-square problem h (Ft) = A F t YP
  8. Calculate the current residual rtemp = Yp –
A F t A F t YP
  9.  if (||rtemp|| > є) then
10.  rt = rt–1
11.  Break
12.  else if (||rtemp|| ≥ ||rt-1||) then
 
13.  if (|| h (Ft)|| – || h old|| < Г then
 
14. s = [s⁄2], L = L + s, h old = h (Ft), rt = rt–1, t =t + 1 {Fine
tuning}
15.  else
 
16. L = L + s, h old = h (Ft), rt = rt–1, t =t + 1 {Fast
­approaching}
Indian Journal of Science and Technology 3
 An Improved Compressed Sensing based Sparse Channel Estimation for MIMO-OFDM Systems with an Efficient Pilot Insertion
Scheme

17.  end if referred to this as to the iterative tail search; the pseudo
18.  else code is shown as Algorithm 2. The size of the search space
19.  Ft-1 = Ft, rt = rtemp, t =t + 1 is greatly reduced after concatenation, and hence, the pro-
20.  end if posed method converges much faster when compared to
21.  end while  the iterative methods.
22.  return h
Output: Estimation of baseband channel impulse Algorithm – 2
response h
Algorithm 2 Pilot placement Based on Concatenated
CDS with an Iterative tail Search
3.2  Computational Complexity Input: An existing (u, υ, α) CDS C for concatenation, the
In this section, the computational complexity of the ­existing number of total subcarriers N, the number of pilot sub-
algorithms in the literature and the proposed algorithm is carriers P, the partial DFT matrix D of which the (m, n)
compared in terms of the number of operations. In addi- 1 − j 2pmn/ N
element is e , where 0 ≤ m ≤ N-1, 0 ≤ n ≤
tion, the complexity of the algorithms also depends on the N
number of iterations. A summary of the computational L–1, and L is the number of taps of the CIR;
0
complexity of the considered algorithms OMP, CoSaMP, 1.  Initialize Ωc = ∅, Ωtemp =∅
SAMP and AS SAMP is provided in Table 1. N 
2.  for i from 1 to   do
u
4.  Pilot Placement i i -1
3.  Ωc = {Ωc  [C + (I − 1) × u ]}
Suppose that the measurement matrix A is composed of 4.  end for N 
Prows of the N × L partial DFT matrix D and the indices 5.  Pr = P – u ×  u  , Ω = ΩC
 
set of the selected rows is Ω, and all the pilot symbols are 6.  for j from 1 to Pr do
equal-powered. We denote the number of repetitions of
7.  Ωtemp = Ω
the different elements of Gas λG= {λg/g = 1, 2..., N − 1},
8. From all Pr –j + 1 possible subsets of size j by adding an
then λ1 = λ2 = ... λ1n–1 = λ which also means that the vari-
element to Ωtemp:
ance of λG is zero. Consider an OFDM system with N=
  Ω = {Ωtemp  k є {Pr+ 1, Pr+ 2,…, N} \ Ωtemp}
1024, in which P= 256 identical pilot symbols are ran-
9. From the matrix A by selecting rows of D for each j-
domly scattered, and the number of taps of the sparse CIR
element sets generated from the previous step, and the
is L= 250. In order to quantize the channel ­estimation
indices set of the selected rows is Ω
error, we adopt MSE, which is defined as
10. From all (Pr –j + 1) of A matrices generated from the

∑
N
MSE = E[ | H (m) − H (m)|2 ]  (9) previous step, calculate the corresponding mutual
m =1
coherence, and choose the set with the minimum
We propose a pilot placement scheme based on the
mutual coherence
­concatenated CDS for pairs of (P, N) where, CDS does
11.  end for
not exist. Specifically; we select the existing CDS with the
12.  return Ω
parameters (u, υ, α) in which u/υ is the closest to P/N.
Output:The pilot indices set Ω
For instance, to select indices for 256 pilots from 1024
To show that as the variance of λGincreases, it is likely
positions, the (133, 33, 8) CDS is used. After concatenat-
that so does the mutual coherence of A and the MSE of
ing the selected CDS, we adopt an iterative procedure to
estimates, Spearman’s rank correlation is adopted to mea-
find the rest of pilot positions which minimize the mutual
sure the strength of a monotonic relationship (i.e., values
­coherence of the resulting measurement matrix. We
of elements in a vector either increase or decrease with
Table 1.  Computational complexity every increase in an associated vector) between paired
Methods OMP CoSaMP SAMP AS-SAMP
vectors. Table 2 shows the Spearman’s rank correlation
|h | −1 |h | −1
between any pair of the following four vectors: the vari-
KPN ≤ KPN ≤ [−Jlog( min )
h log(c K s−SAMP )
+ J ] PN ≤ [−Jlog( min )
h log(c K s − ASSAMP )
+ J ] PN
ance of λG, the mutual coherence μ(A), and the MSE
V. Simulation tables for both the OMP and AS-SAMP algorithms, obtained

4 Vol 9 (20) | May 2016 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 V. Nagendra Babu, V. Adinarayana, K. Muralikrishna and P. Rajesh Kumar

Table 2.  Spearman’s rank correlations

The average
The Average
var(ϒG)§ µ(A) MSE of AS-
MSE of OMP
SAMP
var(ϒG) 1 0.7475 0.7467 0.7527
µ(A) 0.7475 1 0.7481 0.7534
The Average
0.7467 0.7481 1 ---
MSE of OMP
The average
MSE of AS- 0.7527 07534 --- 1
SAMP

Figure 1.  MSE performance of the LS, OMP and AS-

Table 3.  Parameters of compared algorithms SAMP
Sparsity Step Threshold
Name MaxIter Tolerance є
K size s Г
Not Not
OMP 20 15 Not Required
Required Required
Not Not
CoSaMP 20 15 Norm(Noise)
Required Required
Not Not Not
SAMP 1,6,8 Norm(Noise)
Required Required Required
AS Not Not Initially
Norm(Noise) 1
SAMP Required Required 1,6,8
V.B Simulation Results

based on 104 pilot patterns; 103 OFDM symbols and 10dB

Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) were considered. Spearman’s
rank correlation can take values from 1 to −1, with 1
(−1) indicating that two vectors can be described using a Figure 2.  MSE performance of the LS, OMP, CoSaMP
monotonic increase (decrease) function, and 0 meaning
that there is no tendency for one vector to either increase
(decrease) when the other increases.

5.  Simulation Results

We consider UWA channel estimation for a coded OFDM
transmission with N = 1024 subcarriers and bandwidth of
9.8 kHz, leading to a subcarrier spacing of 9.5 Hz. The CP
duration equals to 26 ms, which corresponds to the length
of CP N_CP= 256. Unless otherwise mentioned, the num-
ber of pilots P = 256 is assumed. The data symbols are
drawn independently from a 16-QAM constellation and
are coded using a (1024, 512) low-density parity-check
(LDPC) code. We consider the channel model described
in (6) with N_p = 15 multipaths, in which the inter-­arrival Figure 3.  BER performance of the LS, OMP, CoSaMP

Vol 9 (20) | May 2016 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology 5
 An Improved Compressed Sensing based Sparse Channel Estimation for MIMO-OFDM Systems with an Efficient Pilot Insertion
Scheme
Figure 4.  Running time of the OMP, CoSaMP, SAMP and
Algorithms with different number of pilots.And AS SAMP
algorithms.
Figure 5.  MSE performance of the SAMP and AS SAMP
and AS-SAMP algorithms with various number of pilots.
algorithms with different step sizes.
times are exponentially distributed with a mean of 1 ms,
i.e., E[τ_(j+1) – τ_j] = 1 ms, j ∈ {0,1,..., N_p – 1}. The
average power decreasing exponentially with delay as the
amplitudes are Rayleigh distributed, where the difference
between the beginning and the end of the CP is 20 dB. The
parameters for the considered reconstruction ­algorithms
are given in Table 3.
We compare the proposed algorithm with two ­classic
algorithms, namely Least Square (LS) and OMP using dif-
ferent numbers of randomly distributed pilots. Figure 1.
Compares the MSE performance of the LS, OMP and
AS-SAMP. Figures 2, 3 and 4 plot the MSE, BER and
6 Vol 9 (20) | May 2016 | www.indjst.org
Figure 6.  BER performance of the OMP, CoSaMP, SAMP
SAMP and AS SAMP algorithms.and AS SAMP algorithms
for random and proposed pilot placements for P=256.
the computational complexity with a fixed number of
pilots for all the algorithms, respectively. Figure 5 depict
the MSE performance and computational complexity of
the AS-SAMP and SAMP algorithms with different step
sizes. Figure 6 compares the BER performance of the
OMP, CoSaMP, SAMP and AS-SAMP algorithms with
random and the proposed pilot arrangements. In general,
AS-SAMP with the proposed pilot allocation scheme
provides the best BER performance among all the esti-
mation algorithms with the considered pilot placement
schemes.
6.  Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed an adaptive step size
SAMP algorithm, AS-SAMP, with an efficient near-opti-
mal pilot placement scheme for sparse channel estimation
in OFDM systems. It possesses the advantage of not
requiring a priori knowledge of the sparsity of the chan-
nel. It is shown through performance analysis that the
proposed algorithm can significantly improve the estima-
tion accuracy without introducing significant additional
complexity. In order to ensure a satisfactory estimation,
we have further proposed a near-optimal pilot placement
scheme, which is based on the concatenated CDS with an
iterative tail search. Simulations show that, without sig-
nificantly increasing the computational complexity, the
proposed AS-SAMP with the new pilot placement scheme
provides a better MSE performance for the ­channel
­estimate, as well as the system BER.
Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 V. Nagendra Babu, V. Adinarayana, K. Muralikrishna and P. Rajesh Kumar
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