SOFT DECISION FEEDBACK EQUALIZATION FOR PRE-CODED FIR-MIMO SYSTEMS

Zhi Tian

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI 49931, USA

ABSTRACT In this paper, we take on a soft decision approach to nar-

row the gap between DFE and ML detection for MIMO sys-
In this paper, it is demonstrated that decision feedback tems operating in frequency selective channels. We are in-
equalization (DFE) based on soft-decisions is able to out- spired by the low-complexity soft-decision CDMA detector
perform hard-decision DFE, with an attractive computational introduced in [5]. It uses a multistage detection structure,
cost that is polynomial in the number of symbols to be recov- but replaces the intermediate finite alphabet symbol deci-
ered. A group of soft-decision feedback equalizers (SDFE) sions by soft decisions, expressed via their associated prob-
with probabilistic data association are developed for multi- abilities. Such a soft-decision structure leads to significant
input multi-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems computation reduction when MAI is approximated to obey a
operating in time dispersive channels. Block transmissions single-mode Gaussian probability distribution, an idea orig-
with zero-padded precoding are employed to guarantee chan- inated from the probability data association (PDA) filter [6].
nel identifiablity. Computer simulations indicate that SDFE The PDA detector provides near-optimal performance, with
offers close-to-optimal error probability performance with- overall complexity O(K 3 ), where K is the number of users.
out incurring exponential complexity. Further improvements We adopt this soft-decision approach and develop soft deci-
on these SDFE schemes promise enhanced performance at a sion feedback equalization (SDFE) schemes for FIR-MIMO
reduced computational cost. channels in the quest for low-complexity equalizers with BER
Keywords: soft decision feedback equalization, MIMO sys- performance competitive to that of ML detection.
tems, probabilistic data association.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, soft
decision feedback equalization using PDA filtering is de-
1. INTRODUCTION rived for a single-input single-output (SISO) frequency se-
lective channel. The development of the SDFE scheme for a
Enormous increase in bandwidth efficiency is promised by SISO system (SISO-SDFE) not only provides an essential
the use of MIMO systems in wireless radio frequency links component for building MIMO-SDFE, but also illustrates
[1]. In the case of frequency selective channels, orthogonal a key feature of SDFE: the importance of block transmis-
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can be deployed sions with zero-padded (ZP) precoding. PDA filtering re-
to transmit signals over frequency flat subcarriers. Alterna- quires a decorrelating preprocessor, which is infeasible for
tively, channel-induced inter-symbol interference (ISI) can rank-deficient channels. With ZP precoding, however, the
be mitigated using high-speed equalization techniques, among equivalent channels are guaranteed to be invertible [7], mak-
which decision feedback equalization (DFE) has been proved ing PDA-based SDFE applicable to all channel conditions.
very effective at low computational cost. Equalization in In Section 3, the soft-decision equalization approach is ap-
MIMO systems is more challenging, however, because of plied to frequency-selective MIMO channels. Depending on
the need for signal detection in the presence of both mul- the desirable tradeoff between performance and complex-
tiple access interference (MAI) as well as ISI. MIMO DFEs ity, three soft-decision based algorithms are developed for
have been derived in [2], [3], [4]. In these schemes, tenta- a general FIR MIMO model: (1) joint soft-decision equal-
tive decisions on past symbols or symbols from MAI sources ization and multiuser detection; (2) soft-decision feedback
are made by quantizing properly derived decision statistics. equalization with hard-decision nulling-canceling multiuser
Such a hard-decision based approach may suffer from catas- detection; (3) hard-decision feedback equalization with soft-
trophic error propagation, and in most cases, incurs a non- decision PDA multiuser detection. Computer simulations are
trivial performance gap relative to an optimal maximum like- performed in Section 4 to compare the BER performance of
lihood (ML) detector in terms of bit error rate (BER) perfor- the proposed MIMO-SDFE schemes with that of ML detec-
mance. tion, and a summary is given in Section 5.

0-7803-7551-3/02/$17.00 ©2002 IEEE 594

 2. BLOCK SISO SDFE number of elements in b. To avoid this, we assume that b i ei
conditioned on y ~ is approximated as a uni-modal Gaussian
It has been argued that block equalization offers important random vector with matched mean and covariance, as sug-
advantages over serial equalization in terms of guaranteed gested in a PDA filter [5], [6]. Using the conditional means
channel identifiability and less performance degradation from
E fb jy~ g = 1
 + ( 1)
(1  ) = 2 1, we have
bj = j j j j
noise enhancement or error propagation [7]. We take the the following equalities
block equalization structure and start with a linear, disper-
sive, and noisy digital communication SISO system.
E fb e jy~ g = y~
gi =
X
(2j 1)ej


Denote h = [h(0);


; h(L)] as the symbol-spaced tap
i i (4)
j 6=
i

coefficients in the channel response, with L being the chan-
Covfb e jy~ g
Ri = i i
nel memory length. For block processing, we group the in- X

put time-serial b(n) into blocks of size N and define the k th = 4j (1 j )ej eTj + Rv~v~ (5)


transmitted block to be b k = [b(kN );


; b(kN + N 1)]T . j 6=
i

gi )T Ri 1 (bi ei
 1 (b e
To eliminate the inter-block interference, a zero-padding pre- exp 2 gi )
P r(bi ei jy
i i
~) =
(2 )N=2 jRi j1=2
coder can be used to insert guarding bits between successive (6)


data blocks. To do so, let s k = Pbk , where a guard-inserting P r(ei jy
= exp 2giT Ri 1 ei : (7)
i ~) 

=
matrix P = [ITN 0T(K N )N ]T is constructed by choosing 1 i P r( ei jy~)
K  N + L. The vector s k is a block of K symbols to
be transmitted over the channel, resulting in a received data Decision on bi can be made from  i accordingly. This ap-


block yk = [y (kK );


; y (kK+K 1)]T . The input-output proach is summarized into the following procedure for soft-
model of the block transmission system with ZP precoding decision DFE:
is given by [7]
yk = Hbk + vk ; (1) SISO-SDFE:

where H 2 RK N is a tall Toeplitz matrix made from h. 1. Initialize the probabilities as  j = 0:5; j = 1;


; N .
We assume that the noise vector v k has zero mean and tem-
2. For i = 1 : N , update g i and Ri from (4) and (5), and
poral covariance R vv . In this model, ISI only exists inside
update i based on (7) as follows:
each transmitted block, and does not propagate to adjacent
blocks. This enables the use of block-by-block processing 1
i = 1 :
1 + exp 2giT Ri 1 ei
without loss of optimality, at the expense of transmission re-  (8)
dundancy. We will henceforth drop the block index k for
notational simplicity.
3. Repeat (2) if necessary until all  i converge.
To construct a soft-decision feedback equalizer (SDFE),
we first perform a zero-forcing (ZF) operation on the re- 4. Make decisions on the block of symbols by
ceived block sequence y to obtain: 
1; i  0:5
^bi = i = 1;


; N:
y~ = H+ y = b + H+ v; (2) 1; i < 0:5;
(9)

where H+ denotes the Moore-Penrose psuedo-inverse of the Refinements discussed in [5] can be used to reduce the
channel matrix H, which is guaranteed to be invertible due computational cost of the above procedure. The overall com-
to the ZP precoding. Similar to [5], we write y
~ as plexity of SISO-SDFE is on the order of O(N 3 ).
X
N

y~ = bi ei + bj ej + v
~; (3) 3. MIMO SDFE
j =1 6=
;j i

We now consider a frequency-selective faded MIMO link

where bi is the ith element of b, e i is the ith column of the with Ni inputs and No outputs. MIMO communications
N  N identity matrix I N , and the covariance of the noise
~ = H+ v becomes Rv~v~ = H+ Rvv (H+ )T . For
arise in three situations: (i) multiple transmit and receive
vector v antennas with a single user; (ii) multiple receive antennas
simplicity, a binary transmission is assumed, b k 2 f1gN . and a single transmit antenna with multiple-access users; (iii)
In a soft decision approach, the finite alphabet symbol combination of both (i) and (ii). We will adopt a general
bi is treated as a binary random variable, and is associated MIMO system model that describes all three cases. This


with a probability  i = P r(bi = 1jy ~ ). Direct evaluation model considers each user at each transmitter as one input,
of i from (3) incurs a computational cost exponential in the while each output refers to the signal received at each receive

595
antenna. Accordingly, the number of inputs is determined by Joint SDFE/SDFD for FIR-MIMO channels:
the number of transmit antennas and the number of multiple
access users as well. For convenience, we make no distinc- The same as SISO-SDFE, except that (1) is replaced by (10),
tion among the three terms inputs, transmit antennas, and and N is enlarged to N N i .
users.
Similar to Section 2, a zero-padding precoder is employed 3.2. SDFE with nulling-canceling MUD
at each input. The channel response matrix between the sym-
bol block at the ith input and the j th output takes the same When multiple antennas are employed for high data-rate trans-
form as the H matrix in (1), with each element denoted by missions, the number of transmit and receive antennas N i
h(i;j ) (l), l = 0; 1;


; L, where L is the maximum length and No could be large. In [8], a MIMO system with a wire-
of all the No Ni channel impulse responses. Each element in less spectral efficiency higher than 20 bps/Hz is demonstrated
(1) is then augmented into a block element, that is, y (i) and using Ni = 8 and No = 12. In such applications, complex-


b(i) are augmented into y(i) = [y (1) (i);


; y (No ) (i)]T 2
ity is heavily dependent on the multiuser detection schemes

RNo 1 and b(i) =
[b(1)(i);


; b(Ni ) (i)]T 2 RNi 1 , re-

used. The nulling-canceling (NC) algorithm is an attractive
low-complexity method that has been widely deployed for
spectively. In analogy to (1), the baseband equivalent MIMO the BLAST systems [8]. We propose to use the nulling-
signal model for block processing can be expressed in a canceling technique for multiuser detection over equalized
matrix-vector form as follows flat fading channels, coupled with SDFE within each user.
The overall receiver complexity of such
a MIMO system
is
y = Hb + v
reduced to the maximum of O N 3 Ni2 and O N 3 No2 .
(10)
2 3
H(0) 0 To make the MIMO system model amenable to single-
6 .. .. 7
6 . . 7 transmitter soft-decision equalization, we first diagonalize


H =
6
6 H(L)



7
H(0) 7 (11) the MIMO channel matrix H into a block-diagonal form.
6 7
6 .. .. 7 This can be achieved by premultiplying H with a row trun-
4 . . 5

cating matrix T0 = [IN No 0N No (K N )No ], followed by a
0 H(L) series of N No  N No matrices Ti in the form of
2 3
h(1 1) (l)



;
h(Ni ;1) (l) 2 3

6 7 IiNo 0




where H(l) = 4 .. ..
. . 5:
6 0 INo 7
h(1;No ) (l)


h(Ni ;No ) (l)

6
6
7
7
H(1)H+ (0)
.. ..
Ti = 6 . . 7;
6 7
Efficient soft-decision feedback equalization has been de- 6 .. 7
4 . I(N 1) 5
veloped for a dispersive SISO system. MIMO systems present
H(L)H+ (0)
i No

greater challenges because of the existence of capacity limit- 0

ing multiple access interference and the significant increase
T


T T y = I
H(0) b + Tv;
y~ = N 1 1 0} N (12)
in computational burden. While the soft decision approach | {z | {z }
promises near-optimal BER performance without incurring =
T =
H
intractable complexity, the hard-decision approach is attrac-
tive for its computational simplicity, which is typically on where the operator
denotes the Kronecker product. The
the order of O(N 2 ) in the SISO case. To balance the trade- transformed channel matrix H  is block diagonal. Such a
offs between performance and complexity for various MIMO block diagonalization process is equivalent to the decorre-
system setups, we develop three symbol detection and equal- lating preprocessor in SISO-SDFE. The non-diagonal matrix
ization schemes that blend the soft-decision and hard-decision inside each block, i.e., H(0), indicates the existence of non-
methods in different ways. orthogonal multi-access interference to be suppressed by a
MUD technique, namely nulling-canceling.
3.1. Joint soft-decision equalization and detection
The SISO-SDFE algorithm in Section 2 can be extended to The rest of the algorithm is described as follows:
the MIMO model in (10) in a straightforward manner. Such
an approach considers multiuser detection and channel equal- NC-MUD with SDFE for FIR-MIMO channels:
ization simultaneously, and treats both using soft-decision
feedback. The number of elements in the symbol block b is 1. Initialization for NC-MUD:
now N Ni , and
the computational complexity is on the order
of O (N Ni )3 accordingly. G1 = H+ (0);
i = 1:

596
 2. Recursion: 3.3. SDFD with hard-decision DFE

(a) User ordering: In MIMO system setups where the block size N is signifi-
cantly greater than the number of transmit and receive anten-
ki = arg min
2f 1



j= k ; ;ki 1g
jj(G ) jj2 :
i j (13) nas, the computational task on multiuser detection becomes
less stringent than block equalization. For such cases, we
may combine soft-decision feedback detection (SDFD) with
(b) Nulling: the conventional hard-decision feedback

equalizers. The over-
all complexity is now O N 2 Ni3 .
wki = (Gi )ki ; (14) Both zero-forcing and MMSE based hard-decision feed-
Wki = IN
wki ; (15) back equalization can be used. The following gives a hybrid
rki = Wki y~ i 2 RN 1 :
solution using hard-decision ZF-DFE and the soft-decision
(16)
PDA [5] method for MUD. It takes advantage of the block
Toeplitz structure of the MIMO channel matrix in (11).
(c) SISO-SDFE: note that r ki contains signal com-
ponents from the k i th transmitter only, SDFD-MUD with ZF-DFE for FIR-MIMO channels:

X
rki = el b(l ki ) + ej b(jki ) + v~ ;
N
For n = 1 : N
(17)
j =1 6=
;j l 1. Hard-decision feedback equalization of previously de-
tected symbols of all users:
where Rv~v~ = Wki TRvv TH WkTi .

y(n) X1
n

Apply Steps 1-4 of SISO-SDFE to Eqn. (17) to y (n) = H(m;n) b^ (m): (20)
(k )
obtain ^bj i , j = 1;


; N . m =1
(d) Cancellation: With correct past decisions, y
 (n) = H(0)b(n)+v(n).

X 2. Soft-decision PDA multiuser detection of symbols trans-

^b(ki ) (H
N

y~ i+1 = y~ i  )(j 1) +
Ni ki ; (18) mitted at the nth time, starting with a preprocessor:
j
j =1

H+ (0)y(n) = b(n) + v~ (n):
Gi+1 = H+
(>ki ) (0); (19) y~ (n) = (21)
i = i + 1:
Apply Steps 1-4 of SISO-SDFE to (21) to obtain the
^ (n) = [^b(1) (n);


; ^b(Ni ) (n)]T .
Ni 1 symbol vector b
As in [8], fk1 ;


; kNi g denotes a permutation of the in-
tegers 1;


; Ni specifying the order in which components End n.
of the transmitted symbol vector b (i) are to be processed,
(Gi )j is the j th row of Gi , (H  )ki denotes the ki th column
4. SIMULATIONS

of H, and H(>ki ) denotes the matrix obtained by zeroing
columns k1 ;


; ki of H. In the first example, we consider a single-user FIR fading
channel with a symbol-spaced memory length of L = 4.
Some observations on the NC-MUD/SDFE algorithm are Each FIR tap coefficient is Rayleigh faded. It is assumed to
in order: remain constant over each block of N = 12 symbols, but is
allowed to change from block to block. SISO-SDFE is com-
 Structurally, NC-MUD blends with SISO-SDFE nicely. pared against the conventional zero-forcing hard-decision feed-
After the zero-forcing nulling in Step 2(b), the vec- back equalizer (DFE), zero-forcing linear filter (ZF-only),
tor rki happens to possess the “decorrelated structure” and the optimal ML detector implemented using the sphere
(17) required by the ensuing SISO-SDFE processor. decoding algorithm [9]. The BER performance versus signal-
to-noise ratio (SNR) of these receivers is depicted in Figure
 Due to the preprocessing step (12), the structure of the 1. It is shown that the performance of SISO-SDFE is close
noise covariance matrix is changed and the ordering to that of sphere decoded ML. The performance gap is negli-
algorithm in Step 2(a) is no longer optimal. Refine- gible in the low SNR region, but becomes more pronounced
ments through noise whitening or other optimized user for high SNRs. The hard-decision based DFE and ZF re-
ordering criteria must be devised in order to improve ceivers are computationally simple (O(N 2 )), but suffer from
the detection performance. approximately 2 to 4 dB performance losses.

597
 0 0
10 10

−1 −1
10 10
BER

BER
−2 −2
10 10

Joint SDFD / SDFE

−3 soft−decision DFE −3
NC−MUD / SDFE
10 hard−decision DFE 10
SDFD / ZF−DFE
ZF−only Sphere decoded ML
Sphere decoding

−4 −4
10 10
0 5 10 15 20 −8 −6 −4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

Fig. 1. FIR-SISO fading channel: L = 4; N = 12. Fig. 2. FIR-MIMO fading channel: N i = 2, No = 4, L = 4,

N = 12.

The second example studies multiuser detection and chan-

nel equalization in a frequency selective MIMO channel with 6. REFERENCES
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5. SUMMARY
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