Joint Channel Estimation for Three-Hop MIMO Relaying Systems

We propose a novel joint channel estimator for a relaying MIMO communication system. Considering a three-hop relaying protocol, our combined alternating least squares (Comb-ALS) algorithm obtains cooperative diversity by fully exploiting the tensor algebraic structures of the available cooperative MIMO links. This is achieved by coupling the tensor data for the different relay-assisted links to iteratively estimate the channel matrices. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed tensor-based joint channel estimator in comparison with a sequential tensor-based method and a sequential LS estimator.