Joint decoding and channel estimation for low-complexity STC

In this paper, we study a low-complexity space-time architecture employing per-survivor-processing with imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. The impact of imperfect CSI on the decision metric of the Viterbi algorithm and on the performance of the scheme is analyzed. For the initial channel estimation, we use only a minimum number of pilot signals in order to achieve high spectral efficiency. The novel receiver scheme, proposed in this paper, stepwise decodes the symbols and improves the initial channel estimation. Furthermore, we compare our scheme in numerical simulations with other schemes in terms of performance and complexity.