Smoothed Viterbi & Viterbi Blind Channel Estimation with Ambiguity Cancellation for Multicarrier Transmissions

Abstract:
This paper presents a general blind channel estimation algorithm for multicarrier transmission. The first stage is based on the classical Viterbi & Viterbi approach with the estimation of the mean value of the 4th order moments of received samples. The channel frequency response being estimated independently, phase ambiguities between frequencies have then to be fixed. This correction is done considering only an upper bound for the delay spread of the propagation channel. A projection algorithm is then introduced leading to the estimation of the channel impulse response. The proposed algorithm can be applied to all kinds of multicarrier waveforms. It leads to a communication capacity increase and it can also be used efficiently in a cognitive radio network context.