This paper considers the design of iterative receivers for space-frequencyblock-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SFBC-OFDM) systems in unknown wirelessdispersive fading channels. An iterative joint channel estimation and symbol detection algorithm isderived. In the algorithm, the channel estimator performs alternately in two modes. During thetraining mode, the channel state information (CSI) is obtained by a discrete-Fourier-transform-basedchannel estimator and the noise variance and covariance matrix of the channel response is estimatedby the proposed method. In the data transmission mode, the CSI and transmitted data is obtainediteratively. In order to suppress the error propagation caused by a random error in identifyingsymbols, a simple error propagation detection criterion is proposed and an adaptive training schemeis applied to suppress the error propagation. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results showthat this algorithm gives better bit-error-rate performance and saves the overhead of OFDM systems.
