Joint Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation and Signal Detection in MIMO BLAST Systems

This paper reexamines the problem of frequency offset estimation and signal detection of the Bell laboratories layered space-time (BLAST) scheme. Today, typical multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) receivers separately execute these two steps, but in succession. In this paper, we propose a joint frequency offset estimator and signal detector (JFESD). In our scheme, the frequency offset can be well compensated by utilizing the intermediate detector results. Our detector is evolved from conventional zero-forcing BLAST detectors. It is extendable to situations where the receive dimension is lower than the transmit dimension with a marginal increase of computational complexity. We evaluate the bit error probability and mean square error performance of the JFESD and compare them with other schemes.