A particle filtering algorithm for cooperative blind equalization using VB parametric approximations

We introduce in this paper a new distributed sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm for blind equalization of frequency-selective broadcast channels. In the considered setup, multiple receiving nodes sense independently distorted versions of the same broadcast signal and cooperate to recover it. The proposed approach innovates by using parametric approximations based on the Variational Bayes (VB) method that allow the inter-node communication burden to be greatly reduced compared to previous communication-intensive distributed SMC algorithms. We verify via numerical simulations that the proposed method yields better performance than alternative methods that employ ad hoc parametric approximations, while preserving roughly the same computational cost.