For the downlink, it is desirable to devise decentralized receivers.
Decentralized receivers exploit the knowledge of the desired user parameters only.
They may be further classified into data aided and non-data aided receivers. Data aided adaptive multiuser detection is an approach which does not require a prior knowledge of the interference parameters, but, it requires a training data sequence for every active user. Therefore, special attention is given in this work to analysis of the receiver performance in the case of limited number of samples used for the estimation of the covariance matrix of the input signal. We present a novel blind receiver that is based on the MME criterion and requires estimation of the second order statistics. It is seen that this scheme is particularly effective for a system with fewer, very strong interferers and smaller number of samples used for the estimation of the covariance matrix.