Abstract
In this paper, we propose a subcarrier allocation method and a composite linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimator to increase spectrum efficiency in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmit diversity. The pilot symbols for OFDM transmit (Alamouti) diversity are exclusively allocated in two OFDM symbols in different antennas, which causes serious degradation of spectrum efficiency. To reduce the number of pilot symbols, our subcarrier allocation method uses repetition-coded data symbols, and the proposed channel estimator maintains good bit error rate (BER) performance.