Blind Equalization for Tomlinson-Harashima Precoded Systems

At a communications receiver the observed signal is a corrupted version of the transmitted signal. This distortion in the received signal is due to the physical characteristics of the channel, including multipath propagation, the non-idealities of copper wires and impulse noise. Equalization is a process to combat these distortions in order to recover the original transmitted signal. Roughly stated, the equalizer tries to implement the inverse transfer function of the channel while taking into account the channel noise. The equalizer parameters can be tuned to this inverse transfer function using an adaptive algorithm. In many cases, the algorithm uses a training sequence to drive the equalizer parameters to the optimum solution. But, for time-varying channels or multiuser channels the use of a training sequence is inefficient in terms of bandwidth, as bandwidth is wasted due to the periodic re-transmission of the training sequence. A blind equalization algorithm is a practical method to eliminate this training sequence. An equalizer adapted using a blind algorithm is a key component of a bandwidth efficient receiver for broadcast and point-to-multipoint communications. The initial convergence performance of a blind adaptive equalizer depends on the higher-order statistics of the transmitted signal. In modern digital systems, Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) is often used for signal shaping and to mitigate the error propagation problem of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The concept of THP comes from preequalization. In fact, it is a nonlinear form of pre-equalization, which bounds the higher-order statistics of the transmitted signal. But, THP and blind equalization are often viewed as incompatible equalization techniques. In this research, we give multiple scenarios where blind equalization of a THPencoded signal might arise. With this motivation we set out to answer the question, can a blind equalizer successfully acquire a THP-encoded signal? We investigate the