Performance of Soft-Output Space-Time Equalization for EGPRS
01 January 2000
The use of antenna arrays can help to combat co-channel interference (CCI) in wireless digital cellular systems. In interference-limited scenarios, spatio-temporal filtering techniques may be competitive with respect to trellis based algorithms, because of the difficulty of accurately modelling the space-time characteristics of CCI. We investigate the impact of the quality of the soft-output (reliability information on the coded bits) computed at the output of the space-time equalizer on the receiver performance. Simulation results are provided for an EGPRS receiver employing linear and decision-feedback semi-blind filtering techniques. The best results are obtained with a soft-output derived from short-term statistics based on the distance from the finite alphabet.