Fractional biorthogonal partners in channel equalization and signal interpolation

The concept of biorthogonal partners has been introduced recently by the authors. The work presented here is an extension of some of these results to the case where the upsampling and downsampling ratios are not integers but rational numbers. Hence the name fractional biorthogonal partners. The conditions for the existence of stable and of FIR fractional biorthogonal partners are derived. It is also shown that the FIR solutions (when they exist) are not unique. This property is further explored in one of the applications of fractional biorthogonal partners, namely the fractionally spaced equalization in digital communications. The goal is to construct zeroforcing equalizers that also combat the channel noise. The performance of these equalizers is assessed through computer simulations. Another application considered is the all-FIR interpolation technique with the minimum amount of oversampling required in the input signal. We also consider the extension of the least squares approximation problem to the setting of fractional biorthogonal partners. ∗Work supported in part by the ONR grant N00014-99-1-1002, USA. 1