Wireless Communication over Fading Channels with Imperfect Channel Estimates

In wireless communication systems, transmitted signals are corrupted by fading as well as noise. The receiver can benefit from the estimates of fading channels to detect the transmitted symbols. However, in practical wireless systems channel information cannot be estimated perfectly at the receiver. Therefore, it is crucial to examine the effect of channel estimation error on the structure and performance of the receivers. In the first part of the thesis, we study single-user systems with single-antenna reception over fading channels in the presence of Gaussian-distributed channel estimation error. By using the statistical information of the channel estimation error, we will derive the structure of maximum-likelihood receivers for a number of different modulation formats and then analyze their performance over fading channels. In the second part of the thesis, we consider the uplink of multi-user wireless systems with multi-antenna reception. For conventional diversity combining techniques such as maximal ratio combining and optimum combining we analyze the performance degradation due to imperfect channel estimates in the presence of multiple interfering users for several fading channels. By investigating the probability density function of the output signal-to-interference ratio, we will derive analytical expressions for several performance measures such as the average signal-to-interference ratio, outage probability and average bit-error probability. These expressions quantify performance degradation due to channel estimation error.Ph