Iterative vector channel estimation/MAP/PIC for CDMA systems in time-selective correlated multipath fading channels

Recently, Gao et al. proposed the expectation-maximization (EM) vector channel estimation for single-user direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems to estimate the correlated fading channel coefficients of the paths of a user. They also used one D-lag decision-feedback maximum a posteriori (MAP) detector to detect the information bits. A straightforward extension (noniterative) to multiuser synchronous CDMA cases, i.e., adding the parallel interference cancellation (PIC) multiuser detector into their scheme, results in poor performance. Therefore, we propose an iterative scheme which combines vector channel estimation, decision-feedback MAP detection, and PIC. The partial PIC is applied in the sequence hypothesis stage of MAP in each iteration before the final MAP decision. The proposed scheme has twice the decision delay of the previous scheme for single-user cases. The performance of the proposed system in the time-selective, correlated multipath fading channel environment is investigated. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the noniterative scheme. Simulation results also show that the proposed scheme performs better than its scalar channel-estimation version.