Joint semi-blind channel equalization and ICI mitigation for carrier aggregation based CoMP OFDMA systems with multiple CFOs

We propose a joint semi-blind equalization and inter-carrier interference (ICI) mitigation scheme for multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) corrupted signals in carrier aggregation (CA) based multiple access coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems with OFDMA. The CFO-induced ICI is mitigated implicitly via the independent component analysis (ICA) based semi-blind equalization, without requiring an explicit process of estimation of multiple CFOs. Only a small number of pilots are used to resolve the remaining indeterminacies in the ICA equalized signals, introducing a very low training overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed semi-blind ICA based equalization scheme provides a bit error rate (BER) performance closed to the ideal case with perfect CSI and no CFO, and also outperforms the approach with the constant amplitude zero autocorrelation (CAZAC) sequences based explicit CFO estimation.