Block-based decision-feedback equalizers with reduced redundancy

In recent years many works related to the design of block-based transceivers have been published. The main target of this research activity is to optimize the use of the spectral resources in broadband transmissions. A possible way to address this problem is to reduce the amount of redundancy required by block transmissions to avoid interblock interference. An efficient solution is to employ zero-padding zero-jamming (ZP-ZJ) transceivers, which allow the transmission with reduced redundancy. ZP-ZJ systems have been successfully employed in the context of linear transceivers. This paper shows how the ZP-ZJ concept can be applied in decision-feedback equalization. Some performance analyses based on the resulting mean-square error and error probability of symbols are included to show the possible degrading effects of the reduction in the amount of redundancy. Nevertheless, simulation results illustrate that data throughput and average mutual information between transmitted and estimated symbols can be enhanced significantly without affecting the system performance, for a certain level of signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver.