A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2000

There is a growing demand for providing high rate data services in wireless cellular networks. A technology which is currently being standardized in ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) as GSM Phase 2+ work and boosts data rate on both circuit switching (HSCSD) and packet switching (GPRS) to meet the demands of wireless multimedia applications is the Enhanced Data Rates Over GSM Evolution (EDGE). Because high-level modulation is employed in EDGE, optimum equalization as performed in most GSM receivers is very complex and sub-optimum equalization methods are required. To equalize the inter symbol interference (ISi) introduced due to the multipath channel and the filters, DF-MLSE equalizer is studied. In this work, the simulation model is referred to the EDGE GSM (global systems for mobile communication) systems. The performance is measured as Bit Error Rate (BER) versus Eb/No (the energy per transmitted bit divided by twice the noise spectral density). The performance and complexity of our system is compared with the one proposed by (Nefedov, 1999). The complexity of the equalizer is reduced to a great extent. Various methods for performance improvements have been proposed for further study. However, DF-MLSE looks to be a promising candidate for EDGE as it provides a tradeoff between complexity and performance.