A New Precoder Design for Blind Channel Estimation in MIMO-OFDM Systems

A new precoder for precoding-based blind channel estimation for MIMO-OFDM systems is proposed. In the proposed scheme, only a small number of data symbols, commensurate with the channel length, are linearly precoded prior to transmission to induce the signal correlation needed for the scheme to blindly estimate the channels. Similar to how pilot symbols are transmitted, the subcarriers carrying these linearly precoded data symbols are equi-spaced across the frequency band. The other subcarriers carry data symbols in the standard way, enabling MLD per subcarrier and also allowing for MIMO linear precoding across antennas at each subcarrier. This is in contrast to previous precoding-based blind channel estimation schemes which precode all of the data symbols so that every subcarrier carries a linear combination of symbols, aking the resulting joint MLD problem infeasible. In addition, this also makes it infeasible to employ MIMO precoding per subcarrier across the transmit antennas. The proposed precoder is designed via a multi-stage optimization process that seeks to minimize both channel estimation error and symbol estimation error. For channel estimation purposes, the resulting optimal design offers low-cost features such as sign change and FFT while providing reasonable channel estimation performance for low mobility applications.