Study of a co-designed decision feedback equalizer, deinterleaver, and decoder

A technique that promises better quality data from band limited channels at lower received power in digital transmission systems is presented. Data transmission, in such systems often suffers from intersymbol interference (ISI) and noise. Two separate techniques, channel coding and equalization, have caused considerable advances in the state of communication systems and both concern themselves with removing the undesired effects of a communication channel. Equalizers mitigate the ISI whereas coding schemes are used to incorporate error-correction. In the past, most of the research in these two areas has been carried out separately. However, the individual techniques have strengths and weaknesses that are complementary in many applications: an integrated approach realizes gains in excess to that of a simple juxtaposition. Coding schemes have been successfully used in cascade with linear equalizers which in the absence of ISI provide excellent performance. However, when both ISI and the noise level are relatively high, nonlinear receivers like the decision feedback equalizer (DFE) perform better. The DFE has its drawbacks: it suffers from error propagation. The technique presented here takes advantage of interleaving to integrate the two approaches so that the error propagation in DFE can be reduced with the help of error correction provided by the decoder. The results of simulations carried out for both, binary, and non-binary, channels confirm that significant gain can be obtained by codesigning equalizer and decoder. Although, systems with time-invariant channels and simple DFE having linear filters were looked into, the technique is fairly general and can easily be modified for more sophisticated equalizers to obtain even larger gains.