A blind channel estimation strategy for the 2X1 Alamouti system based on diagonalising 4th-order cumulant matrices

This paper presents a novel blind strategy to estimate the channel parameters in systems that make use of the well known Alamouti orthogonal space-time code to achieve full diversity. The channel parameters are obtained by computing the eigenvectors of a matrix containing 4th-order cumulants of the observations. The matrix to diagonalise is selected for each channel realization using a simple criterion based on the spread of its eigenvalues. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is similar to the obtained using the well-known joint approximate diagonalisation of eigenmatrices (JADE) algorithm, with a low computational cost.