Cyclostationarity Based Blind Block Timing Estimation for Alamouti Coded MIMO Signals

Blind parameter estimation algorithms provide a powerful tool for application scenarios where the use of training or pilot sequences is not desirable, e.g., in order to improve the bandwidth efficiency of the transmission, or in non-cooperative scenarios where such sequences are not available to the receiver. This letter proposes a blind block timing estimation algorithm for Alamouti space-time block coded signals exploiting the second order joint cyclostationary characteristics of the received signal vector, which is induced by the space time block coding operation performed by the transmitter. The proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms by a wide margin.