Turbo equalization with an unknown channel

We consider the problem of joint equalization and decoding, using the method of turbo equalization originally developed by Douillard, et al. [3]. In its original form, turbo-equalization requires accurate knowledge of the channel at the receiver. We propose a receiver structure, based on a soft-input Kalman channel estimator, that can operate effectively without accurate channel knowledge and without training data. The resulting joint channel and data estimator is shown to outperform standard turbo equalization based on moderate-length training data.