Cornell University C. Richard Johnson
The Cornell University Blind Equalization Research Group (C.U. BERG) under the direction of Professor C. Richard Johnson, Jr. has spent the past decade and a half researching blind and semi-blind adaptive algorithms used in communication receiver design, usually for blind equalization and blind synchronization. The current focus of the BERG is the Broadband Adaptive Receiver Design (BARD) Project, which aims to develop and study adaptive algorithms for emerging broadband last-mile communications applications. One manifestation of thisw ork isthe BERG'scurren t e.ort in the development of blind, adaptive algorithmsfor channel shortening. Channel shortening is a generalization of equalization, and it can be applied to the design of receivers for multicarrier communication systems, the design of reduced-complexity maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE), and the design of interference suppression for multiuser detectors. The BARD Project is taking an adaptive system-theory approach to the (blind) channel shortening problem. Through thisapproac h, the BARD Project hasrecen tly produced several blind, adaptive algorithms, leading to receivers with improved performance in timevarying environments, and receivers with greatly reduced complexity requirements. In addition, the BARD Project has analytically characterized several of the existing non-adaptive approaches, leading to both explanations of their (poor) performance in certain (time-invariant) situations, and dramatic reductionsof their implementation complexity.
