A Hybrid Domain Block Equalizer for Single-Carrier Modulated Systems

Poor performance in the presence of multipath with long delay spread has been considered as one of the main weaknesses of most single carrier modulated systems, including ATSC (advanced television systems committee) system. The introduction of distributed transmission network and single frequency network brings new challenges for the ATSC equalizer design, since the delay spread of a multipath channel under such scenarios becomes significantly longer than the traditional broadcasting practice of using one high power transmitter to cover a wide area, where the multipath distortion is mainly from reflected echoes. An iterative hybrid frequency-time domain equalizer for ATSC system is proposed in this paper based on our block-based interference analysis. The multipath distortion in the received ATSC signal is first tentatively removed with a frequency domain equalizer on a block-by-block basis. However, inter-block and intra-block interferences still exist due to the lack of cyclic structure in the received ATSC signal. A time domain interference cancellation algorithm is then used to cancel the inter-block interference and intra-carrier interference, based on the tentative decisions in time domain after the frequency domain equalization. These two steps are iterated until desired receiver performance is achieved. The proposed equalizer and the subsequent analysis are verified through numerical simulations.