D-BLAST OFDM with Channel Estimation

Multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems formed by multiple transmit and receive antennas can improve performance and increase capacity of wireless communication systems. Diagonal Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (D-BLAST) structure offers a low-complexity solution for realizing the attractive capacity of MIMO systems. However, for broadband wireless communications, channel is frequency-selective and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has to be used with MIMO techniques to reduce system complexity. In this paper, we investigate D-BLAST for MIMO-OFDM systems. We develop a layerwise channel estimation algorithm which is robust to channel variation by exploiting the characteristic of the D-BLAST structure. Further improvement is made by subspace tracking to considerably reduce the error floor. Simulation results show that the layerwise estimators require 1 dB less signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than the traditional blockwise estimator for a word error rate (WER) of 10−2 when Doppler frequency is 40Hz. Among the layerwise estimators, the subspace-tracking estimator provides a 0.8 dB gain for 10−2 WER with 200Hz Doppler frequency compared with the DFT-based estimator.