Patent ID: 8693568

Claim:
A method of estimating a channel with use of a dedicated (or user specific) pilot signal in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless communication system with multi-antenna transmit beamforming techniques, the method comprising: a first step of estimating statistical characteristics of virtual channel, generated by beamforming, using statistical characteristics of common pilot channel estimated from a common pilot signal; a second step of determining a dedicated pilot pattern using the estimated statistical characteristics of the virtual channel; a third step of estimating the channel by affine minimum mean squared error (AMMSE)-type interpolation using the dedicated pilot signal; and wherein the second step comprises a process of determining an optimum dedicated pilot pattern by repeating a process of minimizing a mean squared error (MSE) with respect to a pilot signal density, a process of maximizing a system transmission rate in consideration of a pilot signal signaling overhead and channel estimation MSE, and a process of transmitting the optimum dedicated pilot pattern to a transmitter.