We propose a method for MIMO decoding when channel state information (CSI) is unknown to both the transmitter and receiver. The proposed method requires some structure in the transmitted signal for the decoding to be effective, in particular that the underlying sources are drawn from a hypercubic space. Our proposed technique fits a minimum volume parallelepiped to the received samples. This problem can be expressed as a non-convex optimization problem that can be solved with high probability by gradient descent. Our blind decoding algorithm can be used when communicating over unknown MIMO wireless channels using either BPSK or MPAM modulation. We apply our technique to jointly estimate MIMO channel gain matrices and decode the underlying transmissions with only knowledge of the transmitted constellation and without the use of pilot symbols. Our results provide theoretical guarantees that the proposed algorithm is correct when applied to small MIMO systems. Empirical results show small sample size requirements, making this algorithm suitable for block-fading channels with coherence times typically seen in practice. Our approach has a loss of less than 3dB compared to zero-forcing with perfect CSI, imposing a similar performance penalty as space-time coding techniques without the loss of rate incurred by those techniques.
Many techniques exist for communications over unknown MIMO channels that do not rely on channel estimation. For example, Space-Time Block Coding (STBC) was introduced by Alamouti in @cite_10 and formalized by Tarokh . in @cite_20 . These techniques rely on coding transmissions using sets of highly orthogonal codes so that the receiver can recover the transmission without CSI. For the case of two transmitters, rate one space-time block codes exist that impose a 3 dB penalty in terms of SNR at the receiver. For larger numbers of transmitters, rate one codes do not exist. Our techniques do not require any coding at the transmitter and thus do not impose any rate penalty. Numerical simulation shows the decoding performance of our technique to be comparable to rate one STBC methods.
@cite_10 @cite_20
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This paper presents a simple two-branch transmit diversity scheme. Using two transmit antennas and one receive antenna the scheme provides the same diversity order as maximal-ratio receiver combining (MRRC) with one transmit antenna, and two receive antennas. It is also shown that the scheme may easily be generalized to two transmit antennas and M receive antennas to provide a diversity order of 2M. The new scheme does not require any bandwidth expansion or any feedback from the receiver to the transmitter and its computation complexity is similar to MRRC. We introduce space-time block coding, a new paradigm for communication over Rayleigh fading channels using multiple transmit antennas. Data is encoded using a space-time block code and the encoded data is split into n streams which are simultaneously transmitted using n transmit antennas. The received signal at each receive antenna is a linear superposition of the n transmitted signals perturbed by noise. Maximum-likelihood decoding is achieved in a simple way through decoupling of the signals transmitted from different antennas rather than joint detection. This uses the orthogonal structure of the space-time block code and gives a maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm which is based only on linear processing at the receiver. Space-time block codes are designed to achieve the maximum diversity order for a given number of transmit and receive antennas subject to the constraint of having a simple decoding algorithm. The classical mathematical framework of orthogonal designs is applied to construct space-time block codes. It is shown that space-time block codes constructed in this way only exist for few sporadic values of n. Subsequently, a generalization of orthogonal designs is shown to provide space-time block codes for both real and complex constellations for any number of transmit antennas. These codes achieve the maximum possible transmission rate for any number of transmit antennas using any arbitrary real constellation such as PAM. For an arbitrary complex constellation such as PSK and QAM, space-time block codes are designed that achieve 1 2 of the maximum possible transmission rate for any number of transmit antennas. For the specific cases of two, three, and four transmit antennas, space-time block codes are designed that achieve, respectively, all, 3 4, and 3 4 of maximum possible transmission rate using arbitrary complex constellations. The best tradeoff between the decoding delay and the number of transmit antennas is also computed and it is shown that many of the codes presented here are optimal in this sense as well.