This paper discusses a generalized concept of multiple-symbol differential detection (MDD) and analytically derives weight parameters based on channel prediction for MDD on fast time-varying channels. At first, this paper shows that adaptive maximum-likelihood sequence estimation employing per-survivor processing (PSP-MLSE) with a single channel tap is similar concept to MDD. Next, the weight parameters for MDD are derived according to the channel estimation of PSP-MLSE based on a high order channel prediction. Finally, computer simulation confirms that MDD with the analytically derived parameters mitigates floor of bit error rate (BER) on fast time-varying fading channels without channel state information.

This paper proposes an adaptive list-output Viterbi equalizer (LVE) with fast compare-select operation, in order to achieve a good trade-off between bit error rate (BER) performance and processing speed. An LVE, which keeps several survivors for each state, has good BER performance in the presence of wide-spread intersymbol interference. However, the LVE suffers from large processing delay due to its sorting-based compare-select operation. The proposed adaptive LVE greatly reduces its processing delay, because it simplifies compare-select operation. In addition, computer simulation shows that the proposed LVE causes only slight BER performance degradation due to its simplification of compare-select operation. Thus, the proposed LVE achieves better BER performance than decision-feedback sequence estimation (DFSE) without an increase in processing delay.