Baseband Equalization and Carrier Recovery in Digital Radio Systems

The influence of adaptive baseband equalization on decision-feedback carrier recovery performance is investigated. First, it is shown that the delay introduced by the equalizer in the carrier recovery loop does not have basic consequences on system performance. Second, the interaction between the two adaptive circuits is studied for four different equalizer adaptation algorithms. It is found that algorithms based on the zero-forcing criterion are unstable unless they are used with an appropriate constraint. With gradient-type algorithms based on the minimum mean square error criterion, the interaction leads to an improved carrier acquisition performance at the expense of a larger phase jitter. It is therefore concluded that even with these latter algorithms it is generally worthwhile to avoid the interaction by forcing the imaginary part of the equalizer reference tap to zero. The theoretical analysis (carried out with a single complex tap equalizer) is supported by experimental results and computer simulation.