BAD: Bidirectional arbitrated decision-feedback equalization

The bidirectional arbitrated decision-feedback equalizer (BAD), which has bit-error rate performance between a decision-feedback equalizer (DFE) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection, is presented. The computational complexity of the BAD algorithm is linear in the channel length, which is the same as that of the DFE, and significantly lower than the exponential complexity of the MAP detector. While the relative performance of BAD to those of the DFE and the MAP detector depends on the specific channel model, for an error probability of 10^-2, the performance of BAD is typically 1-2 dB better than that of the DFE, and within 1 dB of the performance of MAP detection.