Enhanced Blind Maximum Ratio Combining in Broadcasting Systems

Abstract

We propose an enhanced blind maximum ratio combiner (BMRC) allowing for a transmit signal independent diversity combining in multi-antenna receivers. The underlying Multi-Channel Frequency Least Mean Squares (MCFLMS) algorithm comes with reasonable computational complexity and estimates the channel impulse response for each receive antenna iteratively by means of second order statistics. In literature, the MCFLMS algorithm is mainly applied to audio signals. In this work, we describe several enhancements of this algorithm to ensure its proper convergence with oversampled communication signals which are distorted by frequency-selective fast-fading channels. In addition, we provide BER simulation results for a 1x2 SIMO DVB-T2 system and show that our blind MRC can even outperform conventional pilot-based MRC at the receiver side.