Joint channel-symbol estimation for high-performance differential MIMO

Joint channel-symbol estimation has been recently applied to a differential unitary space-time coded Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system in order to reduce the SNR penalty of differential encoding relative to coherent communications. Using unitary codes restricts the data rate to one symbol per channel use. A block differential MIMO technique was presented in which allows the use of non-orthogonal full-rate full-diversity codes. In this paper joint channel-symbol estimation is used to reduce the SNR penalty of the block differential MIMO system. A computationally efficient suboptimal detection algorithm is presented.