Joint spare channel estimation and decoding for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing using combined message passing

In this study, the authors investigate the use of combined belief propagation (BP), mean field (MF) and expectation propagation (EP) message passing to achieve joint channel estimation and decoding (JCED) for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing where the channel sparsity is exploited, and a low-complexity BP–MF–EP-based JCED receiver is designed. Moreover, comparisons in message updating of state-of-the-art message passing-based JCED receivers are provided to illustrate the merits of the proposed one. In addition, message passing schedules are optimised to achieve better system performance. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed combined message passing receiver in terms of both bit-error-rate performance and convergence speed.