Covering-radius and Collinearity- Minimizing Pilots for Channel Estimation in TDD Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a geometry-aware pilot design for TDD systems that balances coverage and collinearity to improve channel estimation accuracy, using a mixed-integer construction method.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pilot assignment strategy based on covering radius and collinearity minimization, enhancing TDD channel estimation performance.

Findings

MCC pattern improves geometry metrics.

Enhanced latest-slot recovery performance.

Effective for practical TDD allocations.

Abstract

This letter studies pilot design for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing-based time-division duplex (TDD) systems under a sliding-window latest-slot recovery framework that jointly exploits delay-Doppler sparsity across recent slots. Under contiguous-subband and fairness constraints, this viewpoint naturally leads to a geometry-aware time-frequency joint pilot assignment. We show that effective patterns should balance grid coverage and redundant-collinearity suppression, with an additional symmetry-avoidance refinement when complete collinearity elimination is infeasible. Based on these principles, we formulate a mixed-integer construction method compatible with practical TDD allocation. Numerical results show that minimum-coverage-radius and collinearity-control (MCC) pattern improves both surrogate geometry metrics and latest-slot recovery performance.