Semi-blind channel estimation of MIMO-OFDM systems with pulse shaping

Most of the existing MIMO-OFDM channel estimation methods do not take into account the effect of the pulse- shaping Alter in the transmitter nor of the matched Alter in the receiver, thus leading to an estimation solution for the composite channel including the pulse-shaping and matched Alters, instead of for the pure wireless channel. This solution is neither directly applicable to practical communication systems nor sufficiently accurate due to the extra length of the composite channel induced by the two Alters. In this paper, a semi-blind channel estimation method is proposed for pulse-shaped MIMO-OFDM systems. By utilizing the knowledge of pulse-shaping and matched Alters, a time domain semi-blind estimation method is developed for the pure multi-path channel. In order to reduce the computational burden of the time-domain algorithm, a frequency-domain alternative is derived. A number of computer simulation-based experimentations are conducted, and these simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed semi-blind method.