Practical cancellation of nonlinear ISI in data transmission

Nonlinear intersymbol interference (ISI) often arise in voice-band communication channels at high transmission rates or in satellite channels due to nonlinearities in the power amplifiers. Proposed equalizers for the compensation of these nonlinear distortions are mainly based on the Volterra series expansion, which is an elegant but very complex model. This paper presents a new decision feedback equalizer (DFE) which is composed only of linear filters and multipliers. Hence, the complexity of this still very general structure is comparable to linear filtering. Simulations show that the proposed DFE outperforms the conventional DFE and the Volterra DFE with a comparable complexity.