Iterative Channel Estimation for Higher Order Modulated STBC-OFDM Systems with Reduced Complexity

In this paper, a frequency domain Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based channel estimation algorithm for Space Time Block Coded-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (STBC-OFDM) systems is investigated to support higher data rate applications in wireless communications. The computational complexity of the frequency domain EM-based channel estimation is increased when higher order constellations are used because of the ascending size of the search set space. Thus, a search set reduction algorithm is proposed to decrease the complexity without sacrificing the system performance. The performance results of the proposed algorithm is obtained in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Mean Square Error (MSE) for 16QAM and 64QAM modulation schemes.