Calculating the performance degradation of a MMSE/IC turbo-equalization scheme due to SNR estimation errors.

This paper proposes a semi-analytical method for predicting the performance degradation of a turbo-equalization scheme due to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation errors. In other words, sensitivity of turbo-equalization to an imperfect knowledge of the SNR (or, equivalently, channel noise variance) is analyzed. The considered turbo-equalizer uses the Wang and Poor´s soft-in/soft-out (SISO) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) / Interference Cancellation (IC) equalizer and a SISO convolutional decoder. The proposed method is applied to BPSK data modulation and single-user context but may be extended to the multi-user case. This paper shows that the equalizer behavior may be very reliably predicted totally by calculations (no simulations are needed) in the presence of imperfectly known SNR at the receiver. As far as the prediction of the decoder behavior is concerned, it requires simulations for only one independent input parameter. Long frames and perfect channel knowledge at the receiver are assumed in the paper.