Maximum Likelihood Receiver for Multiple Channel Transmission Systems

A maximum likelihood (ML) estimator for digital sequences disturbed by Gaussian noise, intersymbol interference (ISI) and interchannel interference (ICI) is derived. It is shown that the sampled outputs of the multiple matched filter (MMF) form a set of sufficient statistics for estimating the input vector sequence. Two ML vector sequence estimation algorithms are presented. One makes use of the sampled output data of the multiple whitened matched filter and is called the vector Viterbi algorithm. The other one is a modification of the vector Viterbi algorithm and uses directly the sampled output of the MMF. It appears that, under a certain condition, the error performance is asymptotically as good as if both ISI and ICI were absent.