In order to improve the performance of symbol detection in single-carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) system, a list-based detection method used in SC-FDE was proposed, and its performance was analyzed. The algorithm firstly extracted bit reliabilities of conventional SC-FDE symbols, then listed the symbols whose reliability were lower than the threshold, and compared all the likelihood of listed symbols. The symbol with maximum likelihood was set to be the final detection values. According to the choice of threshold, as well as the choice of window size, the algorithm could offer a flexible configuration between implementation complexity and performance. Simulation results showed that this method can achieve significantly improved performance in frequency selective fading channel.
