It was recently shown that the detection performance can be significantly improved if the statistics of channel estimation errors are available and properly used at the receiver. Although in pilot-only channel estimation it is usually straightforward to characterize the statistics of channel estimation errors, this is not the case for the class of data-aided (semi-blind) channel estimation techniques. In this paper, we focus on the widely-used data-aided channel estimation techniques based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. This is achieved by a modified formulation of the EM algorithm which provides the receiver with the statistics of the estimation errors and properly using this additional information. Simulation results show that the proposed data-aided estimator outperform its classical counterparts in terms of accuracy, without requiring additional complexity at the receiver.
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