Fast adaptive equalization/diversity combining for time-varying dispersive channels

We examine adaptive equalization and diversity combining methods for fast Rayleigh-fading frequency selective channels. We assume a block adaptive receiver in which the receiver coefficients are obtained from feedforward channel estimation. For the feedforward channel estimation, we propose a novel reduced dimension channel estimation procedure, where the number of unknown parameters are reduced using a priori information of the transmit shaping filter’s impulse response. Fewer unknown parameters require a shorter training sequence. We obtain least-squares, maximum-likelihood, and maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimators for the reduced dimension channel estimation problem. For symbol detection, we propose the use of a matched filtered diversity combining decision feedback equalizer (DFE) instead of a straightforward diversity combining DFE. The matched filter form has lower computational complexity and provides a well-conditioned matrix inversion. To cope with fast time-varying channels, we introduce a new DFE coefficient computation algorithm which is obtained by incorporating the channel variation during the decision delay into the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. We refer to this as the non-Toeplitz DFE (NT-DFE). We also show the feasibility of a suboptimal receiver which has lower complexity than a recursive least squares adaptation, with performance close to the optimal NT-DFE.