  In this paper, to solve a broad class of complex symmetric linear systems, we
recast the complex system in a real formulation and apply the generalized
successive overrelaxation (GSOR) iterative method to the equivalent real
system. We then investigate its convergence properties and determine its
optimal iteration parameter as well as its corresponding optimal convergence
factor. In addition, the resulting GSOR preconditioner is used to
preconditioned Krylov subspace methods such as GMRES for solving the real
equivalent formulation of the system. Finally, we give some numerical
experiments to validate the theoretical results and compare the performance of
the GSOR method with the modified Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting (MHSS)
iteration.
