Reduced complexity symbol detectors with parallel structures

A practical realization of fixed-delay symbol-by-symbol detection for noisy and time-dispersive channels is discussed. The mapping of the symbol-detection algorithm onto a fully parallel array structure is described. Through systematic reformulations of the algorithm, a number of simplifications are introduced that avoid the computation of exponentials and reduce the number of multiplications to be performed at the expense of introducing a comparable number of simple operations of addition, comparison, and table lookup, the result is shown to be a simplified parallel symbol (SPS) detector. A comparison of the SPS detector and Viterbi detector shows that the former achieves a slightly better performance at low SNR and the latter is simpler in complexity for high values of the delay constraint; otherwise, the two are comparable in complexity and performance.<>