Channel Estimation for Very Low Power MIMO Envelope Detectors

We consider a MIMO system for very low-power applications, e.g, sensor networks, where the receiver employs an envelope detector at each receive antenna. Properties of such systems have been studied, where the channel was considered to be perfectly known at the receiver, or a linear channel estimation model was used. In this paper we propose a very simple channel estimation scheme, which allows the non-coherent MIMO envelope detector to estimate all required channel knowledge necessary for maximum likelihood detection. In contrast to linear MIMO system, complete knowledge of the channel coefficients is not required.