I have a matrix $X$ of size .i.e $(8,8)$ with $M$ columns and $N$ rows. Suppose I took it's $iFFT$ column wise resulting matrix $x$ of size $(8,8)$ too,
$x = F^HX_{(:,m)}, $ ...... (1),
where $F^H$ is Fourier matrix which is complex numbers and $m = 0,1,....M-1$ the selected column.
After organizing signal $x$ in row-wise, $x' = [x_0, x_1, ....,x_N]$ where $x_k$ denotes the $k^{th}$-row of matrix $x$. Then, after convolution with channel $h$, the resulted signal can be written as :
$y = h⨂x'$ , ...... (2),
where $⨂$ denotes the convolution operation.
Then by converting $y$ into frequency domain:
$Y = HX'$ , ...... (3),
where $Y, H$ and $X'$ are the frequency-domain signal of $y,h$ and $x'$, respectively.
To estimate the channel $h$ based on $Y$, it's straightforward by performing $h = iFFT(Y/x')$, and $x'$ is equal to $x$ reshaped in row-wise.
The problem is I don't want to use all matrix $x$ as pilots.
I need to estimate $h$ based on some pilot vectors in matrix $x$, which means the pilots vectors in matrix $x$ are $x_p = x(1:4:N,:)$ and $x_p$ is the pilot vectors here.
So how can I get the relationship between pilots vectors in $x$ and their correspondent in $Y$ based on $Eq.(3)$? Which means how can I estimate the channel $h$ based on vectors row in matrix $X$?