Maximum-likelihood tap selection for equalization of land mobile radio channels

Mobile radio transmission channels characterized by dominating delay paths can be modelled by the linear intersymbol filter with a few significant taps. For such channels, tap-selectable equalization can be used for the receiver complexity reduction. In this paper, a maximum-likelihood method to select channel taps with significant power is presented and its error performance is analyzed. The scheme performs the CFAR (Constant False Alarm Rate) detection when the receiver noise power level is known. We give an analytic derivation of the error probability that exactly quantifies the the effect of noise power estimation.