Blind Noise Variance Estimation for OFDMA Signals

The authors present two new noise variance estimation methods for OFDMA signals transmitted through an unknown multipath fading channel. They focus on blind estimation as it does not require any pilot sequences and is therefore applicable to contexts, such as cognitive radio for instance, where little prior signal knowledge is available. The two estimators are respectively based on the time-frequency sparsity of OFDMA signals and on the redundancy induced by the cyclic prefix. Numerical simulations compare the performance of the two algorithms and highlight their complementarities.