Three Natural Computation methods for joint channel estimation and symbol detection in multiuser communications

Abstract This paper studies three of the most important optimization algorithms belonging to Natural Computation (NC): genetic algorithm (GA), tabu search (TS) and simulated quenching (SQ). A concise overview of these methods, including their fundamentals, drawbacks and comparison, is described in the first half of the paper. Our work is particularized and focused on a specific application: joint channel estimation and symbol detection in a Direct-Sequence/Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS/CDMA) multiuser communications scenario; therefore, its channel model is described and the three methods are explained and particularized for solving this. Important issues such as suboptimal convergence, cycling search or control of the population diversity have deserved special attention. Several numerical simulations analyze the performance of these three methods, showing, as well, comparative results with well-known classical algorithms such as the Minimum Mean Square Error estimator (MMSE), the Matched Filter (MF) or Radial Basis Function (RBF)-based detection schemes. As a consequence, the three proposed methods would allow transmission at higher data rates over channels under more severe fading and interference conditions. Simulations show that our proposals require less computational load in most cases. For instance, the proposed \{GA\} saves about 73% of time with respect to the standard GA. Besides, when the number of active users doubles from 10 to 20, the complexity of the proposed \{GA\} increases by a factor of 8.33, in contrast to 32 for the optimum maximum likelihood detector. The load of \{TS\} and \{SQ\} is around 15–25% higher than that of the proposed GA.