  Vehicular wireless channels are highly time-varying and the pilot pattern in
the 802.11p orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing frame has been shown to
be ill suited for long data packets. The high frame error rate in off-the-shelf
chipsets with noniterative receiver configurations is mostly due to the use of
outdated channel estimates for equalization. This paper deals with improving
the channel estimation in 802.11p systems using a cross layered approach, where
known data bits are inserted in the higher layers and a modified receiver makes
use of these bits as training data for improved channel estimation. We also
describe a noniterative receiver configuration for utilizing the additional
training bits and show through simulations that frame error rates close to the
case with perfect channel knowledge can be achieved.
