Pilot Subcarrier in new OFDM PHY

Hi all,
I am using the new OFDM PHY to get data from USRP. The new OFDM PHY
is
using pilot subcarrier. I think that it using the pilot because it want
using pilot to help decode the data subcarrier. But when I checking the
source code in the channel equalizer, I didn’t find any code that using
pilot to help decoding.
According my opinion, the equalizer just updating the channel state
and
didn’t do anything except that. We should do interpolation using the
pilot
subcarrier channel state to help decoding the data, right? But the
source
code didn’t do that.
So I am wondering why the new ofdm PHY code using the pilot.
Thanks
Yaxiong

Yaxiong Xie

School of Computer Engineering

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

On Sat, Jul 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, YAXIONG XIE [email protected]
wrote:

So I am wondering why the new ofdm PHY code using the pilot.
Thanks
Yaxiong

Yaxiong Xie

Correct, currently the pilots are not being used. This is future work
for the OFDM project.

You still need to declare which subcarriers are pilots at the
receiver, though, so that you know not to try and use them for data.

The current implementation uses a 1-tap equalizer that is calculated
based off the preamble. For slowly changing channels, this is ok and
you can still receive the entire packet. Obviously, using the pilots
throughout will be more robust and handle other channel conditions,
and we really look forward to seeing this implemented :slight_smile:

Tom