Receiver structures for time-varying frequency-selective fading channels

Several receiver structures for linearly modulated signals are proposed for time-varying frequency-selective channels. Their channel estimators explicitly model the time variation of the channel taps via polynomials. These structures are constructed from the following building blocks: (i) sliding or fixed block channel estimators; (ii) maximum likelihood sequence detectors (MLSDs) or decision feedback equalizers (DFEs); and (iii) single or multiple passes. A sliding window channel estimator uses a window of received samples to estimate the channel taps within or at the end of the window. Every symbol period, the window of samples is slid along another symbol period, and a new estimate is calculated. A fixed block channel estimator uses all received samples to estimate the channel taps throughout the packet, all at once. A single pass receiver estimates the channel and detects data once only. A multipass receiver performs channel estimation and data detection repetitively. The effect of the training symbol positions on the performance of the block multipass approach is studied. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the MLSD structures is characterized through simulation and analysis. The proposed receivers offer a range of performance/complexity tradeoffs, but all are well suited to time-varying channels. In fast fading channels, as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) increases, they begin to significantly outperform the per-survivor processing-based MLSD receivers which employ the least mean-squares (LMS) algorithm for channel estimation.