Doubly iterative equalization of continuous-phase modulation

In this paper, a doubly iterative receiver is proposed for joint turbo equalization, demodulation, and decoding of coded binary continuous-phase modulation (CPM) in multipath fading channels. The proposed receiver consists of three soft-input soft-output (SISO) blocks: a front-end soft-information-aided minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer followed by a CPM demodulator and a back-end channel decoder. The MMSE equalizer, combined with an a priori soft-interference canceler (SIC) and an a posteriori probability mapper, forms a SISO processor suitable for iterative processing that considers discrete-time CPM symbols which belong to a finite alphabet. The SISO CPM demodulator and the SISO channel decoder are both implemented by the a posteriori probability algorithm. The proposed doubly iterative receiver has a central demodulator coupled with both the front-end equalizer and the back-end channel decoder. A few back-end demodulation/decoding iterations are performed for each equalization iteration so as to improve the a priori information for the equalizer. As presented in the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis and simulation results for different multipath fading channels, this provides not only faster convergence to low bit error rates, but also lower computational complexity.