Blind Iterative Linear Cancellation of Multipath for Terrestrial Digital Television Receivers

One of the primary reasons for slow adoption of digital TV in North America is coverage reliability in commonly encountered multipath environments. Conventional equalization algorithms have been unable to provide the robust multipath mitigation required, and advanced maximum likelihood type algorithms have proven to be too expensive for consumer applications. This paper presents a modified iterative linear canceller (ILC) with blind startup optimized for 8-VSB application. Simulation results demonstrating superiority of the new scheme to existing methods are presented and it is shown that ILC reaches near multipath-free performance for moderate increase in complexity.