Joint Frequency Offset and Channel Estimation for MIMO Systems Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper addresses the problem of frequency offsets and channel gains estimation for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system in flat-fading channels. The general case where the frequency offsets are possibly different for each transmit antenna is considered. The maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation of the carrier frequency offset for each transmit antenna in a MIMO system is investigated in this paper, assuming that a training sequence is available. The exact solution to this estimation problem turns out to be too complex as it involves a search over a multi-dimensional domain. To solve this complex estimation problem, a novel joint estimation algorithm of frequency offsets and channel gains is proposed. Frequency offsets are first estimated by the particle swarm optimization theory. Then channel gains are estimated by the ML estimator. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance as compared with the correlation-based estimation algorithm and asymptotically achieves the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB), which provides a new idea to solve the problem of joint frequency offsets and channel gains estimation for MIMO systems.