Decision feedback equaliser design using support vector machines

The conventional decision feedback equaliser (DFE) that employs a linear combination of channel observations and past decisions is considered. The design of this class of DFE is to construct a hyperplane that separates the different signal classes. It is well known that the popular minimum mean square error (MMSE) design is generally not the optimal minimum bit error rate (MBER) solution. A strategy is proposed for designing the DFE based on support vector machines (SVMs). The SVM design achieves asymptotically the MBER solution and is superior in performance to the usual MMSE solution. Unlike the exact MBER solution, this SVM solution can be computed very efficiently.