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Signal Processing 84 (2004) 1989–1990

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Editorial

Signal Processing in Communications

With great pleasure I write the foreword for thisSpecial Section on Signal Processing in Commu-nications, containing eight papers originally pre-sented at the Sixth Baiona Workshop on SignalProcessing in Communications, held in Baiona(Spain) in September 2003. These papers are thefinal result of a process which started with a firstselection by members of the Technical Committee,submission of extended versions and a reviewprocess according to the standard procedure forpeer reviewing in Signal Processing.The permanent battle for increasing the trans-

mission rates requires the use of exquisite signalprocessing skills to give adequate responses toscenarios more demanding than ever: time andfrequency selective channels, fully digital multi-purpose receivers, adjacent users posing highinterference levels, etc. In this context, low-complexity, possibly iterative solutions are parti-cular interesting. This is the main motivation forH. Schoeneich and P.A. Hoeher in ‘‘IterativeSemi-Blind Single-Antenna Cochannel Interfer-ence Cancellation and Tight Lower Boundfor Joint Maximum-Likeihood Sequence Estima-tion’’, where they present a surprising one-antennabased interference canceller which does notneed training sequences from the interferingsources. In ‘‘Partial Crosstalk Precompensationin Downstream VDSL’’, a paper of significantengineering practical value, R. Cendrillon,G. Ginis, M. Moonen and K.V. Acker make useof the power of precoding to cancel out most ofthe crosstalk interference in a VDSL systemkeeping an excellent complexity-performance tra-deoff.

e front matter r 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserve

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Channel equalization and identification areclassical topics which are always a source of novelresults. In our case, D. Darsena, G. Gelli, L. Pauraand F. Verde, in ‘‘Subspace-based Blind ChannelIdentification of SISO-FIR Systems with Impro-per Random Inputs’’, use second-order statistics toblindly identify non-minimum phase channels,provided that the source verify some propertiesthat are found in certain cases of practical interest.In the context of the promising multi-carrierspread-spectrum modulation, T. Bianchi, F.Argenti and I. Giannini analyze a channelestimation scheme in ‘‘Data-aided Channel Estima-tion for MC-CDMA Systems with TransmitDiversity in Wireless Channels’’, applicable forseveral transmitting antennas. Also for multi-carrier systems, the problem of equalization undersevere time and frequency selectivity conditions istackled in ‘‘Time-Domain and Frequency-DomainPer-Tone Equalization for OFDM over Doubly-Selective Channels’’, by I. Barhumi, G. Leus andM. Moonen. In this case intrasymbol channelvariation is present on top of the frequencyselectivity; inter-carrier interference is created as aresult, and both time and frequency domainequalizers are necessary.With respect to ancillary tasks such as synchro-

nization, some of the new challenges posed bymulti-purpose receivers are analyzed in ‘‘Multi-rate Receivers with IF Sampling and DigitalTiming Correction’’, by H. Wymeersch and M.Moeneclaey. Both offer a solid analytical founda-tion with good insight into the practical details. Amore theoretical study focused on the applicationof Bayesian methods by using particle filtering

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Editorial / Signal Processing 84 (2004) 1989–19901990

tools to joint estimation and decoding is thepurpose of ‘‘A Sequential Monte-Carlo Techniquefor Blind Synchronization and Detection inFrequency-Flat Rayleigh Fading Wireless Chan-nels’’, by J. Mıguez, T. Ghirmai, M. Bugallo andP.M. Djuric.Finally, the importance of source coding and the

relevance of the new standards on image compres-sion is present in this Special Section. In ‘‘Analysisof Joint Predictive-Transform Coding for StillImage Compression’’, L. Cappellari and G.A.Mian present an analysis of the H.264/AVCintraframe coding paradigm.

We hope to have a new Baiona Workshopas least as successful as the last one in two-yearstime. For futher information, visit http://www.baionaworkshop.org, the permanent site of theBaiona Workshop series.

Guest Editor

Carlos MosqueraDpt. Teorıa de la Senal y Comunicaciones,

Universidad de Vigo, 36200 Vigo, Spain

E-mail address: mosquera@gts.tsc.uvigo.es