Rapid technological advances in recent years have made wireless communication an integral part of modern society in this information age. Among several digital cellular systems, GSM is a successful and dominant wireless system in today's market. Because of its potential application in wireless systems, blind equalization has become an important research subject of communication signal processing in recent years. Although a large number of published works propose various blind algorithms, few have dealt with practical wireless cellular systems. Such a lack of practical consideration of actual wireless systems is alarming and frustrating to practitioners. The main objective of this research is to determine effective means to apply blind equalization into GSM and other similar wireless systems. Its importance arises from considerations that (a) exploiting blind equalization criteria may improve the reliability of GSM receivers; (b) future wireless standards can benefit from blind equalization algorithms by reducing training overhead; (c) studies of practical wireless system will help advance the general research on blind equalization. The challenge as well as the application of blind equalization lies in the practical need for communication receivers to equalize unknown channels without the assistance and expense of training sequences. This research will not only study generic algorithms for QAM blind equalization, but also investigate key issues involved in the application of linear and nonlinear blind equalization algorithms in wireless communications.
