A Computationally Efficient Multilevel Coding Scheme for ISI Channels

This paper proposes a multilevel coding scheme with linear mapping for intersymbol interference (ISI) channels and derives a low-complexity receiver structure that can achieve the ISI channel capacity. The transmitter superimposes many layers of independent binary antipodal streams to generate a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) or Gaussian-like channel input. The receiver performs multistage decoding with decision feedback and interference cancellation. Within each stage is a linear minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) equalizer followed by an error-correcting decoder. The complexity scales linearly with the channel length and the number of layers, and the process is shown to be asymptotically information lossless if a fixed input power is properly distributed over a sufficiently large number of layers. This framework is then extended to achieve the capacity of the ISI channel using a transmitter-side spectral shaping filter that converts a Gaussian input sequence with a white spectrum to one with a water-filling spectrum.