Contradictory block arbitration for bi-directional decision feedback equalizers

We describe a new method to integrate the time-reversal diversity in bi-directional decision feedback equalizers (DFE) for the improvement of detection performance. Bi-directional DFE consists of a traditional DFE in parallel with another DFE operating on the time-reversed sequence of the received signal samples. We propose a new approach based on maximum likelihood sequence estimating to resolve the contradictory blocks in the two DFE detection outputs. We demonstrate that, with only linear computation complexity, bi-direction DFE under this new arbitration strategy can achieve significant BER improvement over the classical DFE as well as bi-directional DFE with linear soft output combining.