Signal space detection in colored noise

An appropriate adaption of the decision boundaries of the well-known signal space detector (SSD) yields a detector that whitens the input noise in the detector forward path. This new detector, called a whitening signal space detector (WSSD), offers higher reliability without increasing the dimensionality of the signal space. A WSSD can be designed by applying a transformation into the ordinary SSD case. We use the new concept to design a WSSD based on three-dimensional 110 equalization and demonstrate its feasibility and performance. The detector can be implemented with a small increase of hardware and offers a significant improvement in terms of bit error rate, especially at low to moderate channel densities.