Spline pulse shaping with ISI-free matched filter receiver

Although the raised cosine pulse shaping filter is a well-established standard in digital communications, in many practical systems simpler approaches are useful. In this paper a new family of pulse shaping filters with zero intersymbol interference after matched filtering is proposed. The method, based on the spline interpolation of the symbol data, exploits two properties of splines: that the B-spline coefficients can be efficiently obtained via digital filtering, and that the B-spline kernels of order n can be constructed from the convolution of n + 1 rectangular pulses. These two facts suggest how to decompose the filtering operations needed to obtain any spline interpolation of odd-order into two matched filters. The proposed architecture allows an efficient implementation, produces optimal performance and shows better spectral characteristics than other suboptimal approaches.