  This manuscript has been submitted to Transactions on Communications on
September 7, 2017; revised on January 10, 2018 and March 27, 2018; and accepted
on April 25, 2018
  We propose a novel filter-type equalizer to improve the solution of the
linear minimum-mean squared-error (LMMSE) turbo equalizer, with computational
complexity constrained to be quadratic in the filter length. When high-order
modulations and/or large memory channels are used the optimal BCJR equalizer is
unavailable, due to its computational complexity. In this scenario, the
filter-type LMMSE turbo equalization exhibits a good performance compared to
other approximations. In this paper, we show that this solution can be
significantly improved by using expectation propagation (EP) in the estimation
of the a posteriori probabilities. First, it yields a more accurate estimation
of the extrinsic distribution to be sent to the channel decoder. Second,
compared to other solutions based on EP the computational complexity of the
proposed solution is constrained to be quadratic in the length of the finite
impulse response (FIR). In addition, we review previous EP-based turbo
equalization implementations. Instead of considering default uniform priors we
exploit the outputs of the decoder. Some simulation results are included to
show that this new EP-based filter remarkably outperforms the turbo approach of
previous versions of the EP algorithm and also improves the LMMSE solution,
with and without turbo equalization.
