Adaptive minimum symbol-error rate equalization for quadrature-amplitude modulation

We propose the adaptive minimum symbol-error rate algorithm, which is a low-complexity technique for adapting the coefficients of a linear equalizer in systems using pulse-amplitude or quadrature-amplitude modulation. The proposed algorithm very nearly minimizes error probability in white Gaussian noise and can significantly outperform the minimum-mean-squared error equalizer (by as much as 16 dB) when the number of equalizer coefficients is small relative to the severity of the intersymbol interference.