Improving error probability of the prefiltered Viterbi equalizer

The present letter deals with the design of suboptimal data detectors for b inary transmission over frequency selective channels. A detector consisting of a prefilter followed by a Viterbi processor with a number of states low er than that needed for maximum likelihood sequence estimation is considere d here. Often the parameters of the receiver are optimized according to the minimum mean square error criterion. Here a stochastic approximation algor ithm that optimizes the parameters of the receiver according to a measure o f error probability is introduced. Simulation results show that the propose d design gives substantial benefits at moderate to high signal to noise rat io.