Semi-blind receivers for multi-relaying mimo systems using rank-one tensor factorizations

Abstract

Cooperative communications have shown to be an alternative to combat the impairments of signal propagation in wireless communications, such as path loss and shadowing, creating a virtual array of antennas for the source. In this work, we start with a two-hop MIMO system using a a single relay. By adding a space-time filtering step at the receiver, we propose a rank-one tensor factorization model for the resulting signal. Exploiting this model, two semi-blind receivers for joint symbol and channel estimation are derived: i) an iterative receiver based on the trilinear alternating least squares (Tri-ALS) algorithm and ii) a closed-form receiver based on the truncated higher order SVD (T-HOSVD). For this system, we also propose a space-time coding tensor having a PARAFAC decomposition structure, which gives more flexibility to system design, while allowing an orthogonal coding. In the second part of this work, we present an extension of the rank-one factorization approach to a multi-relaying scenario and a closed-form semi-blind receiver based on coupled SVDs (C-SVD) is derived. The C-SVD receiver efficiently combines all the available cooperative links to enhance channel and symbol estimation performance, while enjoying a parallel implementation.