Low-Complexity Independent Component Analysis Based Semi-Blind Receiver for Wireless Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Systems

Abstract—In this paper, a novel semi-blind receiver based on independent component analysis (ICA) is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems where a small number of pilots are exploited to resolve phase and permutation ambiguity problems in ICA model, by utilizing the correlation between received and original pilot symbols. Unlike the precoding aided receiver proposed previously, the pilot aided semi-blind receiver is more robust to the change of frame length. Only a small number of pilots are used to solve the indeterminacies, compared to the precoding based method where all of the received and ICA separated symbols are collected to eliminate the ambiguities, and thus our proposed method has low computational complexity and saves the time of resolving the ambiguity problems, particular for a large amount of data. Simulation results show that with a very low training overhead of only 0.05%, the proposed semi-blind receiver has a performance extremely close to the case with perfect channel state information (CSI), and outperforms the precoding aided one in outdoor case. Index Terms—independent component analysis (ICA), multiple-input multiple output (MIMO), semi-blind, pilots I