Blind Signal Reception and Channel Estimation in Downlink MC-CDMA Communication System with Transmit Diversity

Abstract

In this paper, we exploit transmit diversity in downlink multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) system to provide a solution to a high data rate, high capacity, yet reliable and robust to fading channel network. Our first emphasis is on designing a blind (without knowing the undesired users' signatures and channel parameters) MC-CDMA receiver in the mobile station that can suppress the multiple access interference (MAI) and combine the desired signal stemmed from all the transmitting antennas. Two blind signal reception algorithms are proposed and the performances in terms of signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) are comprehensively analyzed. One is based on the decorrelating RAKE (DRAKE) scheme proposed in [IEEE Trans. Communs. 47(7), 1036---1045, 1999] and the other is designed to meet the minimum output energy (MOE) criterion [IEEE Trans. on Information Theory 41(4), 944---996, 1995]. The MOE receiver, though optimum in ideal situation, is semi-blind that the vector channel impulse responses (VCIR) should be explicitly known. While the proposed modified DRAKE receiver is completely blind that it does not require any information of VCIR. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in practical scenario, the modified DRAKE scheme substantially outperforms the MOE receiver. The second part of this paper is to develop an efficient and blind (without requiring training sequences) algorithm to estimate the VCIR of downlink antenna array MC-CDMA system. Simulation results show that both the channel estimation algorithm and the blind reception schemes are reliable and near-far resistant.