A signal perturbation free semi-blind MRT MIMO channel estimation approach

In this paper, an efficient signal-perturbation-free semi-blind approach is proposed for flat-fading channel estimation of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with maximum ratio transmission (MRT). 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. Computer simulations show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the closed-form semiblind estimation method (CFSB) in terms of the MSE of the beamforming vector estimate.