Maximum likelihood turbo iterative channel estimation for space-time coded systems and its application to radio transmission in subway tunnels

This paper presents a novel channel estimation technique for space-time coded (STC) systems. It is based on applying the maximum likelihood (ML) principle not only over a known pilot sequence but also over the unknown symbols in a data frame. The resulting channel estimator gathers both the deterministic information corresponding to the pilot sequence and the statistical information, in terms of a posteriori probabilities, about the unknown symbols. The method is suitable for Turbo equalization schemes where those probabilities are computed with more and more precision at each iteration. Since the NIL channel estimation problem does not have a closed-form solution, we employ the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm in order to iteratively compute the NIL estimate. The proposed channel estimator is first derived for a general time-dispersive MIMO channel and then is particularized to a realistic scenario consisting of a transmission system based on the global system mobile (GSM) standard performing in a subway tunnel. In this latter case, the channel is nondispersive but there exists controlled ISI introduced by the Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) modulation format used in GSM. We demonstrate, using experimentally measured channels, that the training sequence length can be reduced from 26 bits as in the GSM standard to only 5 bits, thus achieving a 14% improvement in system throughput.