An iterative receiver for turbo-coded pilot-assisted modulation in fading channels

We introduce an iterative joint channel and data estimation receiver that exploits both the power of pilot-symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) and turbo coding for fading channels. The key innovation is a low-complexity soft channel estimator which divides a processing block into overlapped cells and performs maximum a posteriori (MAP) sequence estimation and MMSE filtering based on the received signal and extrinsic information delivered by the soft channel decoder. Simulation results show that for turbo-coded PSAM systems under time-variant fading the proposed receiver offers significant performance gains over a non-iterative receiver and two other cancellation schemes.