Channel estimation and data detection for MIMO-OFDM systems

The use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver can significantly increase the channel capacity. These systems are called the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. By using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission techniques, the MIMO-OFDM system can achieve high spectral efficiency, which makes it an attractive candidate for high-data-rate wireless applications. In this paper, we propose a convolutionally coded MIMO-OFDM system with EM-based channel estimation and a QRD-M data detection algorithm. In our systems, one training symbol is transmitted from each transmit antenna for the MIMO channel estimation at the receiver. With the channel estimates available, we apply the QRD-M algorithm on the estimated channel matrix for suboptimal data detection with reasonable computational cost. The bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER) performance of the MIMO-OFDM systems are compared. In the simulations, the bit error rate performance of our systems is 9 (or 5) dB better than that of uncoded (or coded) BLAST systems.