Estimation of the output error statistics of space-time equalization in an antenna array EGPRS receiver with soft-decision decoding

The use of antenna arrays can help combat cochannel interference (CCI) in wireless cellular systems. In this paper, we consider an enhanced general packet radio service diversity receiver based on least squares spatio-temporal equalization and soft-decision decoding in the presence of decision feedback and/or asynchronous CCI. We compare known and novel estimators of the error mean and variance at the output of the deterministic space-time equalizer. The collected simulation data indicate that the estimation of the error mean and variance is critical to the performance of soft-in/hard-out Viterbi decoding in the presence of nonstationary input disturbance. Moreover, the use of short-term error statistics provides receiver performance gains of up to 15-20 dB in terms of signal-to-interference ratio, with respect to the use of burst statistics based on the training sequence midamble and tentative decisions on the payload symbols.