Nonlinear techniques for the joint estimation of cochannel signals

Cochannel interference occurs when two or more signals overlap in frequency and are present concurrently. Unlike in spread-spectrum multiple-access systems where the different users necessarily share the same channel, cochannel interference is a severe hindrance to frequency- and time-division multiple-access communications, and is typically minimized by interference rejection/suppression techniques. Rather than using interference suppression, we are interested in the joint estimation of the information-bearing narrow-band cochannel signals. Novel joint estimators are proposed that employ a single-input demodulator with oversampling to compensate for timing uncertainties. Assuming finite impulse-response channel characteristics, maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) criteria are used to derive cochannel detectors of varying complexities and degrees of performance. In particular, a (suboptimal) two-stage joint MAP symbol detector (JMAPSD) is introduced that has a lower complexity than the single-stage estimators while accruing only a marginal loss in error-rate performance at high signal-to-interference ratios. Assuming only reliable estimates of the primary and secondary signal powers, a blind adaptive JMAPSD algorithm for a priori unknown channels is also derived. The performance of these nonlinear joint estimation algorithms is studied through example computer simulations for two cochannel sources.