Evolutionary algorithms, in particular particle swarm optimization (PSO), have recently received much attention. PSO has successfully been applied to a wide range of technical optimization problems, including channel estimation. However, most publications in the area of digital communications ignore improvements developed by the PSO community. In this paper, an overview of the original PSO is given as well as improvements that are generally applicable. An extension of PSO termed cooperative PSO

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... (CPSO) is applied for MIMO channel estimation, providing faster convergence and, thus, lower overall complexity. Instead of determining the average iterations needed empirically, a method to calculate the maximum number of iterations is developed, which enables the evaluation of the complexity for a wide range of parameters. Knowledge of the required number of iterations is essential for a practical receiver design. A detailed discussion about the complexity of the PSO algorithm and a comparison to a conventional minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator are given. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulations are provided to illustrate the MSE performance compared to an MMSE estimator.