Bacterial Foraging Based Channel Equalizers

Abstract

A channel equalizer is one of the most important subsystems in any digital
communication receiver. It is also the subsystem that consumes maximum computation
time in the receiver. Traditionally maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) was
the most popular form of equalizer. Owing to non-stationary characteristics of the
communication channel MLSE receivers perform poorly. Under these circumstances
‘Maximum A-posteriori Probability (MAP)’ receivers also called Bayesian receivers
perform better.
Natural selection tends to eliminate animals with poor “foraging strategies” and favor the
propagation of genes of those animals that have successful foraging strategies since they
are more likely to enjoy reproductive success. After many generations, poor foraging
strategies are either eliminated or shaped into good ones (redesigned). Logically, such
evolutionary principles have led scientists in the field of “foraging theory” to
hypothesize that it is appropriate to model the activity of foraging as an optimization
process.
This thesis presents an investigation on design of bacterial foraging based channel
equalizer for digital communication. Extensive simulation studies shows that the
performance of the proposed receiver is close to optimal receiver for variety of channel
conditions. The proposed receiver also provides near optimal performance when channel
suffers from nonlinearities.