Blind turbo equalization in Gaussian and impulsive noise

We consider the problem of simultaneous parameter estimation and restoration of finite-alphabet symbols that are blurred by an unknown linear intersymbol interference (ISI) channel and contaminated by additive Gaussian or non-Gaussian white noise with unknown parameters. Non-Gaussian noise is found in many wireless channels due to impulsive phenomena of radio-frequency interference. Bayesian inference of all unknown quantities is made from the blurred and noisy observations. The Gibbs sampler, a Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure, is employed to calculate the Bayesian estimates. The basic idea is to generate ergodic random samples from the joint posterior distribution of all unknowns and then to average the appropriate samples to obtain the estimates of the unknown quantities. Blind Bayesian equalizers based on the Gibbs sampler are derived for both Gaussian ISI channel and impulsive ISI channel. A salient feature of the proposed blind Bayesian equalizers is that they can incorporate the a priori symbol probabilities, and they produce as output the a posteriori symbol probabilities. (That is, they are “soft-input soft-output” algorithms.) Hence, these methods are well suited for iterative processing in a coded system, which allows the blind Bayesian equalizer to refine its processing based on the information from the decoding stage and vice versa—a receiver structure termed as blind turbo equalizer.