Design and Implementation of 16-QAM Transceiver using Near-Maximum-Likelihood Detection for Software Defined Radio

High transmission bit rate in futuristic wireless channels gives rise to severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) and this makes the detection task very challenging. In such cases, Near-Maximum-Likelihood (NML) detection gives much better performance compared to traditionally used equalizers. This paper describes the implementation of a 16-QAM transceiver using NML detection on a model based development platform for Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems. The advantage of model based approach used in this work is that its design and implementation is less time consuming compared to the traditional method.