Design of nonuniformly spaced tapped-delay-line equalizers for sparse multipath channels

Analytical expressions that explicitly indicate the tap values and tap positions of infinite-length, T-spaced tapped-delay-line (TDL) equalizers for sparse multipath channels are derived. Simple design rules for allocating taps to finite-length, minimum mean-square error, nominiformly spaced TDL equalizers (NU-Es) are formulated based on the derived results. The design-rule-based methodology demonstrates a better tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency than existing tap-allocation schemes. The resultant NU-Es also achieve a lower overall computational complexity than conventional, uniformly spaced TDL equalizers (U-Es) of the same span for both directly adaptive and channel-estimate-based implementations. Moreover, a square-root raised cosine (SRRC) receive filter matched to a SRRC transmit filter is better than a matched filter when used to precede a NU-E.