On Blind Channel Estimation in Full-Duplex Wireless Relay Systems

We investigate the feasibility of second-order statistics-based blind channel estimation in the context of two-hop full-duplex relay systems. To that end, the performance of blind and traditional pilot-based (training sequence based) channel estimation approaches are compared. This is accomplished by deriving the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) expressions for both blind and pilot-based schemes, and comparing them to each other and to the mean-squared error (MSE) values measured via simulation. Post-equalization SINR expressions are also derived for both blind and pilot-based methods. Furthermore, a modified post-equalization SINR expression, where the channel estimation error is replaced by the inverse of the Fisher information matrix (FIM) is proposed, providing an upper bound for the post-equalization SINR. These analytically-predicted SINR values for the blind approach are compared to the SINR measured via link simulation. The performance of the two channel estimation methods is analyzed by comparing the CRLB, post-equalization SINR, and BER performance for two significantly different transmission packet sizes. All of the above metrics indicate that blind estimation provides clear performance advantages relative to the pilot-based counterpart. Additionally, the blind approach eliminates the overhead associated with the pilot-based method, where a portion of the system resources is allocated to the pilot sequence. To quantify this, the spectral efficiency of the FD relay system employing blind and pilot-based channel estimation methods are compared, indicating that at high SNR, the blind approach provides around 2-bps/Hz spectral efficiency gain relative to a typical pilot-based method. Finally, the computational complexity of the two channel estimation techniques are evaluated and compared. The blind approach has a clear computational advantage for larger packet sizes.