EM-based iterative receiver for coded MIMO systems in unknown spatially correlated noise

We present iterative channel estimation and decoding schemes for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Rayleigh block fading channels in spatially correlated noise. An expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is utilized to find the maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of the channel and spatial noise covariance matrices, and to compute soft information of coded symbols which is sent to an error-control decoder. The extrinsic information produced by the decoder is then used to refine channel estimation. Several iterations are performed between the above channel estimation and decoding steps. We derive modified Cramer–Rao Bound (MCRB) for the unknown channel and noise parameters, and show that the proposed EM-based channel estimation scheme achieves the MCRB at medium and high SNRs. For a bit error rate of 10 6 and long frame length, there is negligible performance difference between the proposed scheme and the ideal coherent detector that utilizes the true channel and noise covariance matrices. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.