Abstract: | A novel cochannel single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC) receiver is proposed for synchronised Group Special Mobile (GSM) systems. The receiver uses a two-stage strategy, where in the first stage cochannel interference is cancelled by a widely linear filter, while inter-symbol interference due to the GSM frequency-selective Rayleigh-fading environment is removed by a second-stage equaliser. Analytical results for the optimal widely linear filter coefficients are derived. Simulation results show excellent performance with large gains over the conventional receiver under interference limited channel conditions. It is shown that the conventional maximum likelihood sequence estimator or maximum a posteriori probability receiver is optimal when cochannel interference it not the dominant impairment, and it is proposed that the SAIC algorithm is disabled when the estimated carrier-to-interference (C/I) ratio is above a certain threshold |