Introducing erasures in decision-feedback equalization to reduce error propagation

A simple modification of the decision feedback equalizer (DFE) slicer is proposed to reduce the effect of error propagation. A comparison of the performance of the modified DFE and conventional DFE is made for specific channels. On these channels, the modified DFE performs only marginally better than the conventional DFE in terms of average error probability, but may offer some advantages in terms of error probability conditioned on specific input sequences and in terms of the distribution of error burst lengths. Some examples are given, concerning binary PAM and multilevel quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) systems