A New Method For Increasing the Accuracy of EM-based Channel Estimation

Abstract

It was recently shown that the detection performance can be significantly improved if the statistics of channel estimation errors are available and properly used at the receiver. Although in pilot-only channel estimation it is usually straightforward to characterize the statistics of channel estimation errors, this is not the case for the class of data-aided (semi-blind) channel estimation techniques. In this paper, we focus on the widely-used data-aided channel estimation techniques based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. This is achieved by a modified formulation of the EM algorithm which provides the receiver with the statistics of the estimation errors and properly using this additional information. Simulation results show that the proposed data-aided estimator outperform its classical counterparts in terms of accuracy, without requiring additional complexity at the receiver.