MAP Channel-Estimation-Based PIC Receiver for Downlink MC-CDMA Systems

We propose a joint MAP channel estimation and data detection technique based on the expectation maximization (EM) method with paralel interference cancelation (PIC) for downlink multicarrier (MC) code division multiple access (CDMA) systems in the presence of frequency selective channels. The quality of multiple access interference (MAI), which can be improved by using channel estimation and data estimation of all active users, affects considerably the performance of PIC detector. Therefore, data and channel estimation performance obtained in the initial stage has a significant relationship with the performance of PIC. So obviously it is necessary to make excellent joint data and channel estimation for initialization of PIC detector. The EM algorithm derived estimates the complex channel parameters of each subcarrier iteratively and generates the soft information representing the data a posterior probabilities. The soft information is then employed in a PIC module to detect the symbols efficiently. Moreover, the MAP-EM approach considers the channel variations as random processes and applies the Karhunen-Loeve (KL) orthogonal series expansion. The performance of the proposed approach is studied in terms of bit-error rate (BER) and mean square error (MSE). Throughout the simulations, extensive comparisons with previous works in literature are performed, showing that the new scheme can offer superior performance.