New OSTBC for Blind Channel Estimation and Tracking in MIMO-OFDM Systems

Applying orthogonal space time block coding (OSTBC) to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems helps reduce receiver complexity. However, this approach has been applied only to flat fading channels, as when the channel is a frequency selective fading MIMO channel, OSTBC cannot be used directly since its orthogonal propriety may be lost. Furthermore, the MIMO channel is not always known. To deal with this problem, many techniques were proposed to estimate the channel using a training sequence. Unfortunately, these techniques reduce the useful spectral bandwidth. This paper proposes OSTBC for blind channel estimation and data detection in the case of a MIMO frequency selective channel. The aim of this new OSTBC is twofold: to solve the ambiguity of channel estimation and to reduce the complexity of the detector. By exploiting the well-known technique of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the frequency selective fading MIMO channel is split into a set of flat fading subchannels. Moreover, to accommodate the fact that a MIMO channel can be time varying, the steady state Kalman channel estimator (SS-KCE) is extended to track the channel’s fast variations. The performance of the proposed blind algorithm is related by the adequate choice of the number of subcarriers and it is compared with other existing approaches by means of Monte Carlo simulations.