Space-time EVA blind equalization for high data rate wireless communications

At increased data rates, the wireless communication channel suffers from severe intersymbol interference (ISI) due to the multipath fading propagation environment. The ISI effects are more severe for higher order digital carrier modulated signals, such as M-ary QAM. Different channel equalization techniques using space and/or time processing have been proposed. The paper considers the application of the eigenvector approach (EVA) for blind equalization. The EVA is a blind equalization algorithm technique that is based on the higher order statistics (HOS) of the received signal. The combination of time processing with space processing through the use of multiple receiving antennas is shown to improve the system performance dramatically due to the added space diversity. Simulations show that the proposed HOS based receiving antenna array is efficient in detecting high data rate signals transmitted using high order QAM (up to 64-QAM) over multipath fading channels.