The present disclosure relates to a 5G or pre-5G communication system to be provided to support a higher data transmission rate beyond the 4G communication system, such as LTE. The present invention provides a method for estimating a downlink channel by a receiver in a wireless communication system, the method comprising: estimating the downlink channel on the basis of a reference signal to recover an information bit, and checking whether the information bit recovery has succeeded; and when the information bit recovery has not succeeded, selecting at least one of the received signals as a virtual reference signal on the basis of the accuracy of the data reconstructed at a related resource location and the correlation between the related resource location and a resource location related to the reference signal, and estimating the downlink channel on the basis of at least one virtual reference signal.