Modified Viterbi detection for recording channels with jitter

The performance of Viterbi detection is degraded in the presence of jitter in magnetic recording. Based on the assumption of Gaussian jitter, the authors propose a new suboptimal detection algorithm, which is essentially Viterbi detection with a modified error metric which takes into account the pattern-dependent nature of jitter noise. Performance analysis and simulation results indicate that for jitter-dominant channels, significant performance improvement over conventional Viterbi detection can be achieved by using the proposed detection scheme