A Signal Perturbation Free Whitening-Rotation-Based Semiblind Approach for MIMO Channel Estimation

It was shown in our previous work that, in the noise-free case, the whitening-rotation (WR)-based MIMO channel estimation algorithm is subject to a signal perturbation error, justifying that the WR-based method is efficient only in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) case. In this paper, a very efficient signal-perturbation-free WR-based approach is proposed for semiblind channel estimation of MIMO systems. A novel transmit scheme is developed based on the eigenvalue decomposition of the correlation matrix of the transmitted signal. The new scheme is to send a small volume of data bearing the information of the correlation matrix to the receiver for the cancellation of the signal perturbation error so as to improve the performance of the WR-based method in the case of high SNRs. Then, a perturbation analysis of the proposed WR-based semiblind method with the new transmit scheme is conducted, leading to a closed-form expression for the mean square error (MSE) of the channel estimate. Computer simulations show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original WR-based method as well as some other channel estimation methods for all SNR levels.