Iterative Receiver Design for ISI Channels Using Combined Belief- and Expectation-Propagation

In this letter, a message-passing algorithm that combines belief propagation and expectation propagation is applied to design an iterative receiver for intersymbol interference channels. We detail the derivation of the messages passed along the nodes of a vector-form factor graph representing the underlying probabilistic model. We also present a simple but efficient method to cope with the “negative variance” problem of expectation propagation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms, in terms of bit-error-rate and convergence rate, a LMMSE turbo-equalizer based on Gaussian message passing with the same order of computational complexity.