A Semi-Blind Receiver for Multi-Hop MIMO Relay Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel semi-blind receiver for multi-hop multi-input multi-output (MIMO) relay systems using the parallel factor (PARAFAC) model. At the source node, A Khatri-Rao space-time (KRST) coding scheme is consider to construct the transmitted signal. Each relay amplifies the received signals and forwards the amplified signals to the next node. The received signals at the destination node can be formulated as a PARAFAC model, and then a semi-blind receiver is proposed for joint symbol and channel estimation by using an alternating least squares (ALS) algorithm. Under the assumption that channel state information (CSI) is not available at any node, our semi-blind receiver can implement joint channel estimation and symbol decoding. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed semi-blind receiver.