Estimation of channel variation and its applications in OFDM-based systems

High mobility in vehicle-centric networks can impose serious challenges to the design of communication systems based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). A timely estimation of channel variation due to fast fading can be very useful in terms of receiver adaptation and quality of service (QoS) control, etc. In this paper, several algorithms for OFDM-based systems to estimate channel variation are studied and compared, while possible applications are also described. Simulation results show that, with little extra overhead, OFDM-based systems may benefit much from utilizing the information of channel variation obtained by simple estimation algorithms.