A reduced complexity block iterative DFE for dispersive wireless applications

For wireless applications, the computational complexity of the filter design is an important drawback of existing decision feedback equalizers (DFEs). We propose a new iterative block DFE (IBDFE) which operates iteratively on blocks of the received signal. Two design methods are considered. In the first method, hard detected data are used as input of the feedback and filters are designed according to the correlation between detected and transmitted data. In the second method, the feedback signal is directly designed from soft detection of the equalized signal at the previous iteration. From performance evaluations on a wireless dispersive Rayleigh fading channel we observed that the IBDFE outperforms existing DFEs with a significant reduction of computational complexity. Moreover, the two design methods provide a tradeoff between complexity and performance.