| Abstract: | In this paper, a new technique for the blind estimation of frequency and/or time‐selective multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) channels under space‐time block coding (STBC) transmissions is presented. The proposed method relies on a basis expansion model (BEM) of the MIMO channel, which reduces the number of parameters to be estimated, and includes many practical STBC‐based transmission scenarios, such as STBC‐orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), space‐frequency block coding (SFBC), time‐reversal STBC, and time‐varying STBC encoded systems. Inspired by the unconstrained blind maximum likelihood (UML) decoder, the proposed criterion is a subspace method that efficiently exploits all the information provided by the STBC structure, as well as by the reduced‐rank representation of the MIMO channel. The method, which is independent of the specific signal constellation, is able to blindly recover the MIMO channel within a small number of available blocks at the receiver side. In fact, for some particular cases of interest such as orthogonal STBC‐OFDM schemes, the proposed technique blindly identifies the channel using just one data block. The complexity of the proposed approach reduces to the solution of a generalized eigenvalue (GEV) problem and its computational cost is linear in the number of sub‐channels. An identifiability analysis and some numerical examples illustrating the performance of the proposed algorithm are also provided. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
