Joint Antenna Detection and Bayesian Channel Estimation for Non-Coherent User Terminals

摘要

In this paper, we propose a method of improving the channel estimates for non-coherent multi-antenna terminals, which are terminals that cannot control the relative phase between its antenna ports, with channels that can be considered constant over multiple time slots. The terminals have multiple antennas and are free to choose whichever antenna they want to use in each time slot. An unknown phase shift is introduced in each time slot as we cannot guarantee that the terminals are phase coherent across time slots. We compare three different clustering techniques that we use to detect the active antenna. We also compare a set of different statistical and heuristic estimators for the channels and the phase shifts. We evaluate the methods by using correlated Rayleigh fading and three different bounds on the uplink capacity. The accuracy of the capacity bounds are verified with bit-error-rate simulations. With our proposed methods we can have an SNR improvement of approximately 2 dB at 1 bit/s/Hz.