Impact of channel estimation error on the performance of linear FIR equalizers for frequency selective MIMO channels

Receivers require channel state information (CSI) to be able to detect the transmitted information. Therefore the channel has to be estimated. This imperfect channel knowledge results in an extra noise term at the receiver side. In this paper, the influence of a Gaussian channel estimation error on the performance of a linear Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) Finite Impulse Response (FIR) equalizer is investigated. The BER degradation is calculated as a function of the variance of this Gaussian error. The performance of a pilot aided Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimator is also investigated based on the results for Gaussian errors.