Channel estimation for MC-CDMA uplink transmissions with combined equalization

Combined equalization has recently been proposed to enhance the error rate performance of conventional multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) systems. This technique applies pre-equalization at the transmitter in conjunction with post-equalization at the receiver, thereby splitting the overall equalization process into two separate parts. In this way, efficient power allocation over the available subcarriers is possible at the transmitter, while leaving the interference cancellation task at the receiver. In this paper, we consider the uplink of an MC-CDMA system employing combined equalization. As the users transmit from different locations, the uplink signals arrive at the base station after passing through different multipath channels and the goal is to estimate the pre-equalized channel frequency response of each user. This is pursued following two different approaches. The first operates in the frequency-domain and treats the channel gains over adjacent subcarriers as independent unknown parameters. The second operates in the time-domain and achieves better performance by reducing the number of unknown parameters. Both schemes are based on maximum-likelihood reasoning and require knowledge of the transmitted symbols. Numerical examples are given to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed methods.