ORTHOGONAL frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a high spectral efficiency transmission scheme.

It divides a wideband signal into many orthogonal subcarriers and induces a symbol period that is much longer than the bit duration. However, a long symbol period is sensitive to the time-varying channel in wireless communications. The channel response might change during an OFDM symbol period in a high-mobility environment. Therefore, orthogonality among subcarriers is destroyed, andinter-carrier interference (ICI) occurs [1]-[2].Channel estimation for OFDM systems can be generallypartitioned into two categories. The first assumes that thetime-varying channel remains unchanged within an OFDMsymbol period [3]-[4]. In this case, the channel responsewithin one OFDM symbol period can be simply expressedusing an -tuple vector, where is the number of subcarriers in the OFDM. This channel estimation category iscalled vector channel estimation in this paper. The secondcategory considers the fact that channel response can varyduring an OFDM symbol period if a very fast fading channelis considered [2], [5]-[7]. For these methods, the channel response is an -by- matrix, and 2 unknowns need to bedetermined. This is referred to as matrix channel estimation. Ifthe channel response changes smoothly for each path, then theresponse of each path can be modeled using a linear functionwithin an OFDM symbol; thus the number of unknowns canbe reduced [5]-[6]. For the next-generation mobile system,vehicular speeds can be as high as 350 km/hr. This implies that the normalized Doppler frequency is very large, where denotes the Doppler frequency, and is the OFDM symbol