Nelson, Jill K.Zhou, Weiwei2014-09-292014-09-292014-08https://hdl.handle.net/1920/8989Intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by frequency selective multipath propagation is a primary source of distortion in wireless communication systems. ISI significantly degrades system performance, and hence channel equalization is typically employed at the receiver to mitigate the harmful effects of ISI. An equalizer can be designed to operate on either a symbol-by-symbol or sequential basis. Symbol-by-symbol based equalizers estimate the transmitted symbols one at a time, while sequential-detection based equalizers make an estimate of the full transmitted sequence based on the received signal over a full block of data. In this work, we propose computationally efficient methods to design both symbol-by-symbol and sequential equalizers for various communications scenarios.169 pagesenCopyright 2014 Weiwei ZhouElectrical engineeringAsymptotic efficiencyBlind sequential detectionEqualizer designSparse ISI channelTree searchDissertation