Joint beamforming and channel estimation for pilot-aided WCDMA systems

The problem of joint beamforming and channel estimation for multi-rate multi-code systems is addressed. Usual schemes perform this filtering/estimation operation making use of a training sequence time-multiplexed with the transmitted data. However if pilot and traffic signals are transmitted simultaneously using distinct code allocation-as it is the case in recent standards such as cdma2000 or WCDMA-these schemes tend to fail. This paper proposes semi-blind techniques to overcome the uplink auto-interfering effects of such systems. It is shown that the semi-blind approach yields substantially better performance results thanks to the implicit modeling of the unknown traffic data.