Iterative Channel Estimation and Decoding of Turbo Coded SFBC-OFDM Systems

We consider the design of turbo receiver structures for space-frequency block coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SFBC-OFDM) systems in the presence of unknown frequency and time selective fading channels. The turbo receiver structures for SFBC-OFDM systems under consideration consists of an iterative MAP expectation/maximization (EM) channel estimation algorithm, soft MMSE-SFBC decoder and a soft MAP outer-channel-code decoder. MAP-EM employs iterative channel estimation and it improves receiver performance by re-estimating the channel after each decoder iteration. Moreover, the MAP-EM approach considers the channel variations as random processes and applies the Karhunen-Loeve (KL) orthogonal series expansion. The optimal truncation property of the KL expansion can reduce computational load on the iterative estimation approach. The performance of the proposed approaches are studied in terms of mean square error and bit-error rate. Through computer simulations, the effect of a pilot spacing on the channel estimator performance and sensitivity of turbo receiver structures on channel estimation error are studied. Simulation results illustrate that receivers with turbo coding are very sensitive to channel estimation errors compared to receivers with convolutional codes. Moreover, superiority of the turbo coded SFBC-OFDM systems over the turbo coded STBC-OFDM systems is observed especially for high Doppler frequencies.