Extended MLSE receiver for the frequency-flat, fast-fading channel

This paper develops a maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) receiver for the frequency-flat, fast-fading channel corrupted by additive Gaussian noise when linear modulations (M-ASK, M-PSK, and M-QAM) are employed. This paper extends Ungerboeck's derivation of the extended MLSE receiver for the purely frequency-selective channel to the time-selective channel. Although the new receiver's structure and metric assume ideal channel state information (CSI) at the receiver, the receiver structure can be used wherever high-quality CSI is available. The receiver is maximum likelihood for a variety of channels, including Ricean, Rayleigh, lognormal, and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Bounds on the receiver's bit error rate (BER) are deduced for ideal and pilot tone CSI for fast Rayleigh fading. A crude lower bound is developed on the BER of predictor-based receivers for the same channel. This paper offers insight into matched filtering and receiver processing for the fast-fading channel and shows how pilot symbols and tones should be exploited.