Distributed Pilots for Channel Estimation in Single Frequency Networks

The authors propose a novel pilot scheme for channel estimation in Single Frequency Networks (SFN) where multiple synchronized transmitters radiate the same signal. Although the receivers need to know only the aggregate channel to equalize the received symbols, they will show that the pilot overhead can be reduced if the pilots are designed to estimate each propagation channel individually. They design the proposed pilot scheme to match the requirements of the Second generation Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting standard (DVB-T2).