On channel estimation and sequence detection of interleaved coded signals over frequency nonselective Rayleigh fading channels

Due to the receiver complexity introduced by interleaving, the implementation of maximum likelihood (ML) decoding of interleaved coded signals transmitted over frequency nonselective Rayleigh fading channels has been shown to be practically impossible. As an alternative, a two-stage receiver structure has been proposed, where the channel estimation and sequence decoding are done separately. The channel estimation issue in a two-stage receiver is examined in detail in this paper. It is shown that although an optimum [maximum a posteriori (MAP)I channel estimation is not possible in practice, it can be approached asymptotically by joint MAP estimation of the channel and the coded data sequence. The implementation of the joint MAP estimation is shown to be an ML sequence estimator followed by an minimum mean square error (MMSE) channel estimator. Approximate ML sequence estimation using pilot symbol interpolation is also studied, and through computer simulations, its performance is compared to receivers using ML sequence estimation. The effect of decision delay (DD), prediction order, and pilot insertion rate (PIR) on the reduced complexity ML sequence estimation is investigated as well. Finally, a practical receiver is proposed that makes the best compromise among the error performance, receiver complexity, DD, and power (or bandwidth) expansion due to pilot insertion.