A new mobile digital radio transceiver concept using low-complexity combined equalization/trellis decoding and a near-optimal receiver sync strategy

For land-mobile digital radio links over time-variant frequency-selective multipath channels, power and bandwidth efficient signaling and time diversity, as provided by interleaved trellis-coded modulation, are of great importance in a fading environment. A novel digital radio transceiver concept is presented that encompasses interleaved trellis coded modulation with large time diversity factor, a combined equalization/decoding scheme, and a quasi-optimal receiver sync strategy based on purely feedforward channel estimation. The resulting fully coherent and robust receiver is of remarkably low computational complexity. The average BER performance of such a transceiver operating over flat and selective 2-ray Rayleigh as well as typical land-mobile GSM channels is assessed via simulation. The results reveal the receiver´s robustness and good BER performance and also shed light on the effects of insufficient interleaving at low vehicle speeds