Impact of blind versus non-blind channel estimation on the BER performance of GSM receivers

We investigate in this paper whether the HOS-based blind channel estimation method EVI (eigenvector approach to blind identification) can compete with the nonblind cross-correlation-based scheme used in state-of-the-art GSM receivers (Global System for Mobile communication). For blind, non-blind, and ideal estimates of COST-207 mobile radio channels, we give simulated bit error rates (BER) after Viterbi detection in terms of the mean signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Averaged over three COST-207 propagation environments, EVI leads to a mean SNR loss of 1.2 dB only, while it saves the 22% overhead in the GSM data rate due to the transmission of training sequences. Since just 142 samples are used for channel estimation, we consider this performance outstanding for an approach based on HOS.