Comparison between Performances of Channel Estimation Techniques for CP-LTE and ZP-LTE Downlink Systems

In this paper, we propose to evaluate the performance of channel estimation techniques for Long Term Evolution (LTE) Downlink systems based on Zero Padding technique (ZP) instead of Cyclic Prefixing (CP). LTE Downlink system is a multiuser system based on a MIMO-OFDMA technology. Usually, in OFDM systems, a guard interval is inserted in order to mitigate both inter-carrier interference (ICI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI). LTE Downlink systems are based on CP-OFDM technique which consists of a copy a last OFDM symbols inserted at the beginning of each transmitted OFDM symbol. Although this technique shows good performances, the CP-LTE system suffers from a power efficiency loss.With the number of present OFDM symbols in LTE Downlink radio frame, the bandwidth loss becomes more important. Instead of CP, we propose to evaluate the performance of ZP-LTE systems in order to avoid the power efficiency .In this paper, we interest to evaluate the performance of channel estimation techniques for the two LTE Downlink systems. Simulations results show that although ZP-LTE systems outperform CP-LTE Downlink systems in terms of power efficiency, the CP-LTE systems show better performance than ZP-LTE systems and especially for high SNR values. MATLAB Monte-Carlo simulations are used to evaluate the performance of LS, LMMSE and Lr-LMMSE estimators in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) and Bit Error Rate (BER) for 2x2 LTE Downlink systems.