A Study on Blind Channel Equalization Based on Higher-Order Cumulants

This paper presents a fourth-order cumulants based iterative algorithm for blind channel equalization. It is robust with respect to the existence of heavy Gaussian noise in a channel and does not require the minimum phase characteristic of the channel. In this approach, the transmitted signals at the receiver are over-sampled to ensure the channel described by a full-column rank matrix. It changes a single-input/single-output (SISO) finite-impulse response (FIR) channel to a single-input/multi-output (SIMO) channel. Based on the properties of the fourth-order cumulants of the over-sampled channel outputs, the iterative algorithm is derived to estimate the deconvolution matrix which makes the overall transfer matrix transparent, i.e., it can be reduced to the identity matrix by simple reordering and scaling. Both a closed-form and a stochastic version of the proposed algorithm are tested with three-ray multi-path channels in simulation studies, and their performances are compared with a method based on conventional second-order cumulants. Relatively good results are achieved, even when the transmitted symbols are significantly corrupted with Gaussian noise.