Performance of an Adaptive Blind Equalizer for QAM Signals

This paper presents a performance study of a blind adaptive channel equalization scheme. This scheme is based on a single cost function, which is created by combining two well-defined cost functions, the constant modulus algorithm (CMA) and the alphabet-matched algorithm (AMA). The combined cost function considers both the amplitude and the phase of the equalizer output, which allows for more efficient equalization of QAM signals. We present results that compare equalization of a 16-QAM signal using the new cost function with that obtained using the CMA cost function alone. The performance measures used for the comparison are the average mean-squared error (MSE) and the average symbol error rate (SER)