Joint detection and estimation in space-time coding and modulation

We consider joint channel estimation and data symbol detection for multipath radio channels with multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver. An iterative space-time receiver is proposed, based on the expectation-maximization algorithm. We examine the performance of this receiver on the Rayleigh fading channel for transmit diversity and space-time coding methods. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver can often achieve near-coherent performance with modest complexity (2-3 iterations) and using very few training symbols.