An Optimum Blind Receiver for Correlated Rician Fading MIMO Channels

A blind receiver scheme for narrowband separately- correlated Rician block fading coded MIMO systems is described. It is shown that this receiver (which can be interpreted as a limiting case of the optimum pilot-aided receiver) attains the maximum achievable throughput at sufficiently high E_b/N₀ ratio. The influence of the E_b/N₀ ratio and of the channel Rice factor on the receiver performance are studied and it is shown that, as either of these parameters increases, the advantage of the blind versus the pilot-aided receiver becomes more sensible. The results obtained support the intuition that, if the line-of-sight component is sufficiently strong, a blind scheme using only the knowledge of the fading statistics parameters matches or outperforms pilot- aided detection.