A limited search variant of the tree-search detector

A limited search variant of the fixed delay tree-search detector is described for recovery of digital signals corrupted with intersymbol interference and additive noise. The limited search algorithm uses a variant of the equalizer decision device, a simple slicer, to reduce the number of paths that are considered by the tree-search detector from M/sup D+1/ to D+1 paths, significantly reducing the complexity of the tree-search detector. Simulation results are provided that show the new detector suffers a nearly negligible loss in performance, compared to that of the full fixed delay tree-search, due to the path reduction.