Code and receiver design for the noncoherent fast-fading channel

This paper deals with the design of coding/modulation and demodulation/decoding schemes for single- or multiple-antenna systems with focus on fast-fading channels, where channel state information (CSI) is not available at the transmitter and the receiver. We explore two possible solutions for this channel with increasing degree of sophistication. The first one utilizes pilots at the transmitter and a simple and explicit noniterative channel estimation algorithm at the receiver. We show that this pilot-assisted system is exactly equivalent, in terms of performance analysis and design, to an appropriately "degraded" system having perfect CSI at the receiver. The second scheme utilizes pilots and a family of well-justified and simple suboptimal iterative detection/estimation algorithms. It is shown that when turbo-like codes are considered in conjunction with this pilot-assisted transmission scheme and the proposed receiver algorithm, the unitary constellations investigated in the literature are inferior to simple pilot-assisted constellations in both complexity and performance. Specific instances of the proposed systems (that use optimized irregular low-density parity-check outer codes) are designed. The design examples provided show that the proposed systems can achieve a good tradeoff between complexity and performance and can be used to bridge the gap between the high complexity/high-performance optimal scheme and low-complexity/mediocre performance noniterative estimation/coherent detection scheme.