Performance Analysis of Turbo Coding with Blind Channel Estimation in a SIMO FIR Channel

This paper addresses the issue of blind channel estimation (BCE) of multi channel FIR filters. This is an issue arising in e.g. mobile communication systems using digital signaling. It also arises in the presence of frequency selective fading, when training (reference/pilot) symbols are unavailable. In this contribution we analyze the performances of a 1/2 rate turbo code of various frame lengths using BCE in a SIMO FIR channel. The BCE technique used here is the second order statistics algorithm based on subspace decomposition (SSD). The turbo coding scheme is combined with this BCE technique in order to characterize a realistic scenario. Two types of blind equalizers were investigated; the zero forcing and the minimum mean squared error equalizers together with two types of decoding algorithms; the SOVA and the log-MAP algorithm. Simulations show that the performance of the schemes using the SOVA decoder is about the same as the schemes using the log-MAP decoder