In this paper, we consider filter-and-forward relay beamforming using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in the presence of inter-block interference (IBI). We propose a filter design method based on a constrained max-min problem, which aims to suppress IBI and also avoid deep nulls in the frequency domain. It is shown that IBI can be suppressed completely owing to the employment of beamforming with multiple relays or multiple receive antennas at each relay when perfect channel state information (CSI) is available. In addition, we modify the proposed method to cover the case where only the partial CSI for relay-receiver channels is available. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance as the number of relays and antennas increases due to spatial diversity, and the modified method can make use of the channel correlation to improve the performance.

In block transmission systems, blind channel shortening methods are known to be effective to reduce the influence of interblock interference which degrades the performance when the length of a channel impulse response is extremely long. Conventional methods assume that the transmitted signal is uncorrelated; however, this assumption is invalid in practical systems such as OFDM with null carriers and MC-CDMA. In this paper, we consider blind channel shortening methods for block transmissions when the transmitted samples within a block are correlated. First, the channel shortening ability of a conventional method is clarified. Next, a new method which exploits the fact that the transmitted samples in different blocks are uncorrelated is introduced. It is shown that the proposed method can shorten the channel properly under certain conditions. Finally, simulation results of OFDM and MC-CDMA systems are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with a conventional one.

This letter is concerned with a new algorithm which can be used to design a time-domain equalizer (TEQ) for xDSL systems employing the discrete multitone (DMT) modulation. The proposed algorithm, derived by neglecting the terms which do not affect the performance of a DMT system in ARMA modeling, is shown to have a good performance compared with the previous TEQ algorithms even with a significantly lower computational complexity. In addition, the proposed algorithm does not require the channel impulse response or training sequence, since all processing is made only with the received data.