Adaptive channel aided decision feedback equalisation for SISO and MIMO systems

Abstract

Error propagation can seriously affect the performance of an adaptive decision feedback equaliser (DFE), especially when operated in time-varying channel environments. Error propagation not only affects DFE decisions, but also disturbs the DFE adaptation. The paper focuses on improving the robustness against error propagation for the least-mean-square (LMS) based minimum mean-squared-error DFE (MMSE-DFE). A specifically designed channel estimator is introduced to help the DFE adaptation in the decision-directed (DD) mode. Unlike the conventional DFE, the proposed adaptive channel-aided DFE (ACA-DFE) only adapts the feedforward filter with the LMS algorithm. The feedback filter, however, is obtained from the postcursors of the estimated channel convolved with the feedforward filter. As a result, the proposed ACA-DFE can reduce the error propagation effect and perform better than the conventional adaptive DFE. We also demonstrate that the ACA-DFE can be extended to multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) systems improving the performance of the conventional MIMO DFE.