Joint maximum-likelihood channel estimation and signal detection for SIMO channels

In wireless communication systems, channel state information is often assumed to be available at the receiver. Traditionally, a training sequence is used to obtain the estimate of the channel. Alternatively, the channel can be identified using known properties of the transmitted signal. However, the computational effort required to find the joint ML solution to the symbol detection and channel estimation problem increases exponentially with the dimension of the problem. To significantly reduce this computational effort, we formulate the aforementioned problem in a way that makes it possible to solve it via the use of sphere decoding, an algorithm that has polynomial expected complexity. We also provide simulation results and a complexity discussion.