Consistent estimation of Rayleigh fading channel second-order statistics in the context of the wideband CDMA mode of the UMTS

We address the problem of estimating the second-order statistics of a frequency-selective Rayleigh channel in the context of the wideband CDMA mode of the UMTS. The data to be transmitted are sent over slots on which the channel is assumed to remain constant. Each slot contains a pilot symbol sequence from which it is possible to estimate the current value of the channel. The covariance matrix of the channel is usually estimated by a denoised version of the empirical covariance matrix of the trained channel estimate. However, in the UMTS, this estimate is not consistent in the sense that if the number of slots used to estimate it tends to infinity, it does not converge to the true covariance matrix of the channel. We propose a new consistent estimate of the covariance matrix and evaluate the performances of two Wiener-like channel estimation schemes based on the proposed estimate. The performances of the new approach are evaluated by means of the bit error rate provided by a RAKE receiver based on the proposed channel estimates. It is shown that our estimate of the covariance matrix allows significant improvement in the performance of the RAKE receiver.