Boosting factor estimation for LTE control channel

This paper considers the problem of unknown boosting factor estimation for Long Term Evolution (LTE) downlink control channel, whose signal can be boosted or deboosted for power control. The boosting factor needs be estimated and utilized to deploy advanced receiver algorithms. We first show that an iterative algorithm can be used to find the solution for this estimation problem. However, the use of iterative algorithms poses numerous modem implementation challenges. For this reason, we investigate non-iterative estimation of the boosting factor and propose a novel approach based on joint estimation of the boosting factor and modulation symbols. The main idea of the proposed scheme is to utilize various techniques such as bias reduction and approximate dimension reduction and improve the estimation performance of this baseline method. The simulation results show that the proposed non-iterative algorithm can achieve near optimal performance close to that of the maximum likelihood (ML) solution for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).