Blind Decoding of MISO-OSTBC Systems Based on Principal Component Analysis

In this paper, a new second-order statistics (SOS) based method for blind decoding of orthogonal space time block coded (OSTBC) systems with only one receive antenna is proposed. To avoid the inherent ambiguities of this problem, the spatial correlation matrix of the source signals must be non-white and known at the receiver. In practice, this can be achieved by a number of simple linear precoding techniques at the transmitter side. More specifically, it is shown in the paper that if the source correlation matrix has different eigenvalues, then the decoding process can be formulated as the problem of maximizing the sum of a set of weighted variances of the signal estimates. Exploiting the special structure of OSTBCs, this problem can be reduced to a principal component analysis (PCA) problem, which allows us to derive computationally efficient batch and adaptive blind decoding algorithms. The algorithm works for any OSTBC (including the popular Alamouti code) with a single receive antenna. Some simulation results are presented to demonstrate the potential of the proposed procedure