Joint channel estimation and data detection in space-time communications

The paper considers joint channel estimation and data sequence detection for multipath radio channels with multiple antennas at the transmitter and/or receiver. An iterative space-time receiver based on the expectation-maximization algorithm is proposed. We examine the performance of this receiver for transmit diversity and space-time coding methods over Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results show that the receiver can often achieve near-coherent performance with modest complexity and using very few pilot symbols.