A Joint Channel Estimation and Data Detection for a MIMO Wireless Communication System via Sphere Decoding

A joint channel estimation and data detection technique for a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless communication system is proposed. It combines the least square (LS) training based channel estimation (TBCE) scheme with sphere decoding. In this new approach, channel estimation is enhanced with the help of blind symbols, which are selected based on their correctness. The correctness is determined via sphere decoding. The performance of the new scheme is studied through simulation in terms of the bit error rate (BER). The results show that the proposed channel estimation has comparable performance and better computational complexity over the existing semi-blind channel estimation (SBCE) method.