Reduced Receivers for Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling and General Linear Channels

Fast and reliable data transmission together with high bandwidth efficiency are important design aspects in a modern digital communication system. Many different approaches exist but in this thesis bandwidth efficiency is obtained by increasing the data transmission rate with the faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) framework while keeping a fixed power spectral density (PSD). In FTN consecutive information carrying symbols can overlap in time and in that way introduce a controlled amount of intentional intersymbol interference (ISI). This technique was introduced already in 1975 by Mazo and has since then been extended in many directions. Since the ISI stemming from practical FTN signaling can be of significant duration, optimum detection with traditional methods is often prohibitively complex, and alternative equalization methods with acceptable complexityperformance tradeoffs are needed. The key objective of this thesis is therefore to design reduced-complexity receivers for FTN and general linear channels that achieve optimal or near-optimal performance. Although the performance of a detector can be measured by several means, this thesis is restricted to bit error rate (BER) and mutual information results. FTN signaling is applied in two ways: As a separate uncoded narrowband communication system or in a coded scenario consisting of a convolutional encoder, interleaver and the inner ISI mechanism in serial concatenation. Turbo equalization where soft information in the form of log likelihood ratios (LLRs) is exchanged between the equalizer and the decoder is a commonly used decoding technique for coded FTN signals. The first part of the thesis considers receivers and arising stability problems when working within the white noise constraint. New M-BCJR algorithms for turbo equalization are proposed and compared to reduced-trellis VA and BCJR benchmarks based on an offset label idea. By adding a third low-complexity M-BCJR recursion, LLR quality is improved for practical values of M . M here