A simple cascade approach to multipath fading compensation

This paper presents a simple cascade approach for accelerating the convergence rate of blind equalization in a severe multipath fading environment with specific examples concerning aeronautical telemetry communications. The simple approach is realized by cascading a feedforward filter and a transversal filter to form a cascade-based equalizer. The feedforward filter first reduces fading distortion to a certain extent by means of the slope compensation, and then the transversal filter further compensates the remaining distortion by forming an inverse transform. The performance of the cascade-based equalizer is simulated in typical telemetry fading channels and is compared with the transversal filter. The simulated results show that the cascade-based equalizer achieves a fast convergence rate in severe fading channels having a fade null depth up to 35 dB without degrading the system performance.