Bit Error Rate Minimizing Channel Shortening Equalizers for Multicarrier Systems

Multicarrier systems first became widely used for digital subscriber lines (DSL). In DSL, the performance metric is the bit rate that can be provided without exceeding a given bit error rate (BER). Wireless multicarrier systems are becoming more popular, and in such systems the appropriate performance metric is the BER for a given bit rate. Multicarrier systems are robust to multipath provided that the channel delay spread is shorter than the guard interval between blocks. If this condition is not met, a channel shortening equalizer can be used. Previous work on channel shortening has focussed on maximizing the bit rate for DSL. We propose and evaluate a channel shortener that attempts to directly minimize the BER of a wireless multicarrier system