Algorithm for Detecting the Number of Transmit Antennas in MIMO-OFDM Systems: Receiver Integration

Knowledge of the channel between all transmit-receive antenna pairs is essential for enabling the decoupling of spatial streams and coherent data detection in wireless MIMO-OFDM systems. The design of the preamble structure for MIMO channel estimation in an ad-hoc system depends on the number of transmit antennas in the system. A challenge at the receiver is therefore to accurately detect the number of transmit antennas in order to perform MIMO channel estimation. In this contribution we extend our previous algorithm for detecting the number of transmit antennas as presented in Ohlmer et al. (2008) and show how to integrate this algorithm in a typical receiver flow. Results show that our algorithm can be successfully applied in a realistic system if the unavoidable synchronization inaccuracies are carefully taken into account.