  Optimal decoding of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) MIMO-OFDM where
an imperfect channel estimate is available at the receiver is investigated.
First, by using a Bayesian approach involving the channel a posteriori density,
we derive a practical decoding metric for general memoryless channels that is
robust to the presence of channel estimation errors. Then, we evaluate the
outage rates achieved by a decoder that uses our proposed metric. The
performance of the proposed decoder is compared to the classical mismatched
decoder and a theoretical decoder defined as the best decoder in the presence
of imperfect channel estimation. Numerical results over Rayleigh block fading
MIMO-OFDM channels show that the proposed decoder outperforms mismatched
decoding in terms of bit error rate and outage capacity without introducing any
additional complexity.
