Channel Estimation for DS-CDMA Systems: A Partial Difference Equation Approach

In the communications literature, a number of different algorithms have been proposed for channel estimation problems with the statistics of the channel noise and observation noise exactly known. In practical systems, however, the channel parameters are often estimated using training sequences which lead to the statistics of the channel noise difficult to obtain. Moreover, the received signals are corrupted not only by the ambient noises but also by multiple-access interferences, so the statistics of observation noises is also difficult to obtain. In this paper, we will investigate the channel estimation problem for direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) communication systems with time-varying multipath fading channels. The channel estimator is designed by applying a partial difference equation approach together with the innovation analysis theory. This method can give a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of an channel estimator.