Error performance analysis of MLSE for frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels with Kalman channel estimation

Previously, the use of statistical channel modelling and Kalman filtering has been proposed as a means of improving sequence estimation for rapidly fading frequency-selective channels. In the present paper the Viterbi algorithm decoder in Dai and Schwedyk is shown to approximate the classical quadratic receiver for Gaussian signals. An exact expression for the pairwise error probability is obtained which can include the effects of antenna diversity and channel modelling errors. Approximations for the system block error rate are evaluated and compared to simulation results. Finally a single Ricatti update Kalman filter is proposed that significantly reduces decoder complexity in space diversity applications with no loss in performance