Soft channel estimation using the Iterative Soft Correlator Estimator (I-SCE)

We present a simple and efficient method that iteratively refines the channel estimate in a turbo equalizer exploiting soft feedback of the decoder. Our proposed lowcomplex iterative solution for channel estimation performs repeatdly an interference cancelation step followed by correlation with symbol estimates derived from the output of the decoder. The novelty here lies on the fact that the soft estimator step is repeatedly (i.e. iteratively) performed wihtout the activation of the channel decoder. Therefore, we call this algorithm 'Iterative Soft Correlator Estimator' (I-SCE). It is shown that the ISCE signigicantly outperforms its non iterative version SCE. Additionally, the I-SCE performs as well as the soft least squares with considerable less complexity.