A blind and robust space-time receiver for a turbo coded system

We propose an adaptive joint space-time algorithm for decoding turbo coded signals arriving at an antenna array. This is done in a (semi)-blind manner using a finite alphabet property of the coded signal and iteratively estimating the channel jointly with the turbo decoding. An advantage of the proposed method is that the symbols can be detected in a robust way, as no assumptions on the array geometry or propagation environment are made. Further, simulations show that in a single user scenario the performance-loss is negligible compared to a system utilizing perfect channel knowledge. The method is also shown to give significantly enhanced performance compared to a system where the channel estimation and decoding are done sequentially in both static as well as fading multi user scenarios.