SIC based soft QRD detection for coded single carrier block transmission with unique word

The frequency selective fading channels cause severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) and significantly degrade the bit error rate (BER) performance of broadband wireless communication systems. In this paper, a soft detection algorithm employing the idea of QR decomposition, data grouping and successive interference cancelation (SIC) is proposed for coded single carrier (SC) block transmission. We show that SC block transmission with unique word (UW) brings two unique features while employing the QRD detection method. We refer to them as the natural ordering property and the sparse property, respectively. The data block is divided into small groups and the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of each element is derived from the bottom up. A flexible tradeoff between BER performance and detection complexity can be provided. Simulation results show that in frequency selective fading channels, the proposed scheme can obtain dramatic performance gain compared to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) single carrier frequency domain equalization(FDE) with low complexity.