<![CDATA[In this paper, we examine an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system under imperfect channel conditions and pilot-insertion- based channel estimation. However, unlike conventional pilot-insertion-based channel estimation, some inserted pilot symbols are set to zero where the index of the zero-pilot symbols is employed to transmit extra data bits. In this paper, we employ a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) to detect transmitted pilot symbols; these symbols are then used to estimate channel coefficients. Furthermore, the impact of zero-pilot symbols on the mean-squared error of channel estimation and on system error performance is examined. Our findings show that the index of zero-pilot symbols can be used to improve system throughput by carrying extra information bits without harming channel estimation accuracy or degrading system error performance. Simulation results show that, at a high signal-to-noise ratio, the bit error rate for data bits transmitted via zero-pilot symbols index selection is lower than that of data bits transmitted over data subcarriers.]]>
