SNR Estimation in Nakagami Fading Channels with Arbitrary Constellation

In this paper, a novel technique is proposed to estimate the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for Nakagami-m fading channels with an arbitrary signal constellation. The Nakagami-m distribution is a good fit to empirical fading data obtained from radio communication channels. The proposed algorithm uses absolute second and fourth moments of the envelope of the received signal over a block of data as the sufficient statistics. The estimator is blind and no training sequence is used. It is also independent of signal constellation.