Channel estimation for MIMO-OFDM systems in fixed broadband wireless applications

Systems employing multiple transmit and receive antennas, known as multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems can be used with OFDM to improve the resistance to channel impairments. Thus the technologies of OFDM and MIMO are equipped in fixed wireless applications with attractive features, including high data rates and robust performance. However, since different signals are transmitted from different antennas simultaneously, the received signal is the superposition of these signals, which implies new challenges for channel estimation. In this paper we propose a time domain MMSE based channel estimation approach for MIMO-OFDM systems. The proposed approach employs a convenient representation of the discrete multipath fading channel based on the Karhunen-Loeve (KL) orthogonal expansion and finds MMSE estimates of the uncorrelated KL series expansion coefficients. Based on such an expansion, no matrix inversion is required in the proposed MMSE estimator. Also the performance of the proposed approach is studied through the evaluation of minimum Bayesian MSE.