Near-Optimum Blind Decision Feedback Equalization for ATSC Digital Television Receivers

Abstract

This paper presents a near-optimum blind decision feedback equalizer (DFE) for the receivers of Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) digital television. By adopting a modified trellis decoder (MTD) with a trace- back depth of 1 for the decision device in the DFE, we obtain a hardware-efficient, blind DFE approaching the performance of an optimum DFE which has no error propagation. In the MTD, the absolute distance is used rather than the squared Euclidean distance for the computation of the branch metrics. This results in a reduction of the computational complexity over the original trellis decoding scheme. Compared to the conventional slicer, the MTD shows an outstanding performance improvement in decision error probability and is comparable to the original trellis decoder using the Euclidean distance. Reducing error propagation by use of the MTD in the DFE leads to the improvement of convergence performance in terms of convergence speed and residual error. Simulation results show that the proposed blind DFE performs much better than the blind DFE with the slicer, and the difference is prominent at the trellis decoder following the blind DFE.