AN ANALYSIS OF PILOT SYMBOL ASSISTED MODULATION FOR RAYLEIGH FADING CHANNELS

Proposals have appeared recently for the use of pilot symbols to mitigate the effects of rapid fading in mobile communications. Unlike the more familiar pilot tone systems, pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) does not affect the transmitted pulse shape or the peak-to-average power ratio, and implementation is straightforward. This paper puts PSAM on a solid analytical basis, a feature missing from previous work. It presents closed form expressions for the BER in BPSK and QPSK, for a tight upper bound on SER in 16QAM, and for the optimized receiver coefficients. The error rates obtained are lower than for differential detection for any combination of SNR and Doppler spread, and the performance is within 1 dB of a perfect reference system under slow fading conditions, and within 3 dB when the Doppler spread is 5% of the symbol rate.