Channel Estimation Improvement for MIMO Single-Carrier Block Transmission System

In this paper, we propose an effective way of improving the performance of channel estimation for MIMO single-carrier block transmission (SCBT) systems. The proposed method utilizes the property that the shift of the cyclic pilot signal of each antenna branch can also be utilized to catch the channel information as a new pilot. The receiver can continuously estimate the channel information by just shifting the received pilot signal. The channel estimation performance is improved by averaging all channel estimators because this averaging process can reduce the power of noise component. Regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the pilot type, the proposed method can achieve about a 1.72 dB performance gain in term of the mean squared error (MSE) of channel estimation for each antenna branch with slightly computational complexity. The proposed method can be also utilized to most channel estimation methods for the MIMO SCBT system.