On Iterative Receivers for Non-Coherent Channels

It is well-known that optimal receivers for many wireless communication systems employ joint channel estimation and decoding. Since this is almost always too computationally complex, we consider iterative receivers that approximate joint estimation and decoding by iterative algorithms. Continuous-valued variables such as the channel phase response are often difficult to handle in these algorithms. We present a systematic approach, canonical distributions, for solving this problem and apply it to the design of iterative receivers for block non-coherent Rayleigh fading channels.