NSF Award
9360320
9360320 Spooner This project is funded under the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which is designed to provide an opportunity for small business, particularly the small high technology firm, to participate in NSF research. Phase I of the SBIR program serves as a filter to select promising proposals and determine if the firm can do high quality research. Phase II is the principal research project. Phase III is the conversion of the NSF-funded research into commercial applications and technological innovation supported by follow-on private venture capital or other non-federal financing. This Phase I project analyzes the development of a blind channel identifier/equalizer (BCIE) suitable for use on digital communication signals such as BPSK, QPSK, M-PSK, and M-ary QAM, which are corrupted by unknown channel distortion and noise. The BCIE is needed to reliably extract the transmitted message from the received data. Areas being investigated are the tradeoffs in using BCIE vs more conventional equalizers; the range of operating environments; the performance and applicability of the candidate BCIE algorithms; and the commercially available DSP hardware appropriate for prototype imlementation of the candidate BCIE algorithm.
