Is blind channel estimation feasible in mobile communication systems? A study based on GSM

In this paper, we compare the effect of blind and nonblind channel estimates on the performance of global system for mobile communications (GSM) receivers. More precisely, we investigate whether two blind approaches, based on higher order statistics (HOS), can compete with two conventional methods, exploiting training sequences. For blind and nonblind estimates of six fast and slowly fading mobile radio channels, we give simulated bit error rates (BER's), after Viterbi detection, in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), We also study the influence of cochannel interferers at different values of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR), Averaged over the six channel examples, we demonstrate that the blind channel estimation algorithm eigenvector approach to blind identification (EVI) leads to an SNR loss of 1.2-1.3 dB only, while it saves the 22% overhead in GSM data rate caused by the transmission of training sequences, Since just 142 samples are used for blind channel estimation, we consider this performance outstanding for an approach based on HOS.