Reducing Complexity Using Path Selection for Sequential Blind Beamforming for Wireless Communications

In this paper, a path selection technique based on power level detection is introduced to our previously proposed MRC-sequential blind beamforming method to reduce the receiver complexity. MRC-SBB mitigates the inter-symbol and intra-symbol interferences by recovering the signal and its integer and non-integer multiple replicas using jointly CMA, LMS and adaptive fractional time-delay-estimation filtering. While the resulting improvement using this method is proportional to the number of the detected paths and also the interpolation filters´ complexity, targeting portable applications motivates us to propose a technique to reduce the power consumption while maintaining good performance. Thus, in this paper, a path selection technique based on the paths´ power-level detection and digital filter dynamic activation is introduced to significantly reduce the power consumption of the hardware circuits. Simulations in different scenarios using path selection for MRC-SBB were carried out, and the obtained results validate the power consumption efficiency without sacrificing the BER performance.