Universal Decoding for Gaussian Intersymbol Interference Channels

Abstract: A universal decoding procedure is proposed for the intersymbol interference (ISI) Gaussian channels. The universality of the proposed decoder is in the sense of being independent of the various channel parameters, and at the same time, attaining the same random coding error exponent as the optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder, which utilizes full knowledge of these unknown parameters. The proposed decoding rule can be regarded as a frequency domain version of the universal maximum mutual information (MMI) decoder. Contrary to previously suggested universal decoders for ISI channels, our proposed decoding metric can easily be evaluated.