Robust channel estimation and detection for single-carrier and multicarrier block transmission systems

Block transmission techniques, including single-carrier (SC) and multicarrier (MC) communication techniques, have received much research interest recently for their better ability to handle the intersymbol interference problem than continuous transmission. Numerous detection schemes for SC and MC communication systems have been proposed. While these schemes may be derived from different principles, they usually rely on some initial estimate of the communication channel and/or the covariance matrix of the received signal. However, such estimates usually contain inherent estimation errors to which most existing detection schemes are known to be sensitive. In this paper, we develop robust estimation and detection schemes that explicitly account for channel and covariance matrix estimation errors by optimizing the worst-case performance over properly selected bounded uncertainty sets. Although the prior channel and covariance matrix-estimation errors are generally not bounded, we show that it is beneficial to refine the channel and covariance matrix estimates over properly chosen bounded uncertainty sets centered on the prior channel and covariance matrix estimates. Numerical results show that an improved performance is achieved by using the proposed robust approaches over the ones that ignore the prior estimation errors.