Soft-adaptive turbo equalization: Using soft information in adaptation

Turbo equalizers have been exploited for underwater wireless communication due to their excellent practical performance. As the equalizer is adaptive, it is possible to take advantage of the soft information available from the decoder in the adaptation process. In this paper, we consider a method to do this and compare it with the use of soft information in feedback, which is a method that has been considered in the past. Data from the KAM11 experiment demonstrates that using soft information in adaptation can improve performance over using it only in feedback. We also consider combining these different approaches and how this affects performance.