In the context of satellite communications, random access methods can significantly increase throughput and reduce latency over the network. The recent random access methods are based on multi-user multiple access transmission at the same time and frequency followed by iterative interference cancellation and decoding at the receiver. Generally, it is assumed that perfect knowledge of the interference is available at the receiver. In practice, the interference term has to be accurately estimated to avoid performance degradation. Several estimation techniques have been proposed lately in the case of superimposed signals. In this paper, we present an overview on existing channel estimation methods and we propose an improved channel estimation technique that combines estimation using an autocorrelation based method and the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, and uses pilot symbol assisted modulation to further improve the performance and achieve optimal interference cancellation.
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