2013/03/18 by Dimitrios Katselis, Cristian R. Rojas, Katselis, Dimitrios +7
Computer Science · Mathematics · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #cs.IT #math.IT
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1303.4289
arxiv created 2013/03/18 · arxiv updated 2013/03/19
The fundamental task of a digital receiver is to decide the transmitted symbols in the best possible way, i.e., with respect to an appropriately defined performance metric. Examples of usual performance metrics are the probability of error and the Mean Square Error (MSE) of a symbol estimator. In a coherent receiver, the symbol decisions are made based on the use of a channel estimate. This paper focuses on examining the optimality of usual estimators such as the minimum variance unbiased (MVU) and the minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators for these metrics and on proposing better estimators whenever it is necessary. For illustration purposes, this study is performed on a toy channel model, namely a single input single output (SISO) flat fading channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). In this way, this paper highlights the design dependencies of channel estimators on target performance metrics.