1374 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 61, NO. 4, APRIL 2013
Normalized Adaptive Channel Equalizer Based on
Minimal Symbol-Error-Rate
Meiyan Gong, Fangjiong Chen, Member, IEEE,HuaYu,Member, IEEE, Zhaohua Lu, and Liujun Hu
Abstract—Existing minimum-symbol-error-rate equalizers
were derived based on the symbol-error-rate objective function.
Due to the complexity of the objective function the derivation is
not straightforward. In this paper we present a new approach
to derive the minimum-symbol-error-rate adaptive equalizers.
The problem is formulated as minimizing the norm between two
subsequent parameter vectors under the constraint of symbol-
error-rate minimization. The constrained optimization problem
then is solved with the Lagrange multiplier method, which
results in an adaptive algorithm with normalization. Simulation
results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the
existing adaptive minimum-symbol-error-rate equalizer in
convergence speed and steady-state performance.
Index Terms—Adaptive channel equalizer; Minimum Symbol-
Error-Rate; constrained optimization.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
ONVENTIONAL criteria for receive filter design, such
as the minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) criterion
and the least-square (LS) criterion, adopt the squared error
as the performance measure. These criteria intend to min-
imize the mean or cumulant of the squared error between
the filter output and the target signal. However, in practice
it is the system’s symbol error rate (SER), not the mean
squared error (MSE), that really matters. It has been illustrated
by various simulations that minimizing the MSE does not
necessarily produce the minimum SER (MSER) performance
[1]. Moreover, the theoretical analysis on MMSE receiver
also indicates that, when channel coding is not applied, the
achievable SER of MMSE receiver is not optimal [2]
1
.The
MSER criterion, which is directly based on minimizing the
SER, has attracted increasing attention in the past two decades.
The MSER criterion can be traced back to the error rate
analysis in multipath channel [4]. Recently the MSER criterion
has shown promising performance in various research fields,
Manuscript recei ved September 15, 2012; revised January 16 and January
30, 2013. The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and
approving it for publication was G. Colavolpe.
M. Gong, F. Chen, and H. Yu (corresponding author) are with the
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University
of Technology, Guangzhou, China (e-mail: myan.gong@mail.scut.edu.cn,
{eefjchen, yuhua}@scut.edu.cn). This work was supported in part
by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61171083,
No.61071212, No.61271209), the Key Grant Project of Chinese Min-
istry of Education (No.313021) and Guangdong Provincial research project
(No.S2011010001241, 2012B091100138).
Z. Lu and L. Hu are with the Wireless Pre-Research Department, ZTE Coor-
poration, Shenzhen, China (e-mail: {lu.zhaohua, hu.liujun}@zte.com.cn).
Their work is supported by the Chinese Next-generation Broadband Wireless
Mobile Communication Network Major Science and Technology Issues
(No.2010ZX03003-002-02).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCOMM.2013.13.120698
including chann el equalization [5]–[9], multiuser detection
[10]–[12], beamforming [13], [14], power control/allocation
[15], [16], carrier phase recovery [17], timing recovery [18]
and precoding [19]. A thorough review on the application of
the MSER criterion can be found in [1].
In this paper we focus on MSER-based channel equal-
ization. In existing research, the MSER equalizer is derived
based on the bit error rate (BER) or SER objective function,
which are for BPSK sources and QAM sources, respectively.
The BER/SER objective functions are non-convex and conse-
quently it is difficult to obtain a closed-form solution. I terative
approaches usually are applied. In [5], [7]–[9] the gradient-
descent method is applied to find a local minimum of the
BER/SER objective functions. By setting the gradient to zero,
ref. [6] obtains a nonlinear function for the MSER equalizer
and solves the nonlinear function by an iterative approach.
The iterative approach and the gradient-descent method are
not practical sample-by-sample adaptive equalizers since they
need a batch of samples to build the objective f unctions. To
derive a sample-by-sample adaptive algorithm, approximations
have been applied to simplify the objective functions [5]–[8].
Due to the complicated structure of the BER/SER objective
functions, the derivation o f the adaptive MBER/MSER (AM-
BER/AMSER) equalizers is not straightforward. Moreover, the
resulting adaptive equalizers in existing work usually have
complicated structures. For in stance, the adaptive equalizer
in [6] needs the channel parameters to calculate the symbol
detection indicator (see (31) in [6]). However, the channel
parameters may not be available to the equalizer in practice.
The adaptive equalizer in [8] needs the estimate of the noise
variance to calculate the instantaneous stochastic gradient (see
(39) in [8]).
In this paper we present a n ew approach to derive the
AMBER/AMSER equalizers. Consider a sample-by-sample
adaptive equalizer, where the equalizer parameters are updated
when a new sample is received. The problem is formulated
as minimizing the norm between two subsequent parameter
vectors under the constraint of minimal BER/SER. Compared
with the existing work that derives the equalizers based on the
BER/SER objective functions, our proposed problem model
has the following properties: (1) The MSER criterion is
reformulated as the constraint of correct symbol detection. It
does not need to calculate the BER/SER expressions and h ence
has a simpler derivation. (2) For different source modulation
1
The recent work of Rusek et al [3] indicates that in the presence of a
good coding and decoding scheme, the MMSE receiver is almost optimal. We
remark that the theoretical analysis of [2], [3] both assume that the channel
input is zero-mean Gaussian process. The conclusion may not be applicable
to other types of channel input.
0090-6778/13$31.00
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2013 IEEE