A low-cost decision-aided channel estimation method for Alamouti OSTBC

Abstract

In wireless communication systems, channel state information (CSI) acquisition is typically performed at the receiver side every time a new frame is received, without taking into account whether it is really necessary or not. Considering the special case of the 2 × 1 Alamouti orthogonal space-time block code, this work proposes to reduce computational complexity associated with the CSI acquisition by including a decision rule to automatically determine the time instants when CSI must be again updated. Otherwise, a previous channel estimate is reused. The decision criterion has a very low computational complexity since it consists in computing the cross-correlation between preambles sent by the two transmit antennas. This allows us to obtain a considerable reduction on the complexity demanded by both supervised and unsupervised (blind) channel estimation algorithms. Such preambles do not penalize the spectral efficiency in the sense they are mandatory for frame detection as well as for time and frequency synchronization in current wireless communication systems.