A computationally efficient detector for MIMO systems

Abstract

In this work, a newly designed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector for implementation on software-defined-radio platforms is proposed and its performance and complexity are studied. In particular, we are interested in proposing and evaluating a MIMO detector that provides the optimal trade-off between the decoding complexity and bit error rate (BER) performance as compared to the state of the art detectors. The proposed MIMO decoding technique appears to find the optimal compromise between competing interests encountered in the implementation of advanced MIMO detectors in practical hardware systems where it i) exhibits deterministic decoding complexity, i.e., deterministic latency, ii) enjoys a good complexity–performance trade-off, i.e., it keeps the complexity considerably lower than that of the maximum likelihood detectors with almost optimal performance, iii) allows fully parameterizable performance to complexity trade-off where the performance (or complexity) of the MIMO detector can be adaptively adjusted without the requirement of changing the implementation, iv) enjoys simple implementation and fully supports parallel processing, and v) allows simple and efficient extension to soft-bit output generation for support of turbo decoding. From the simulation results, the proposed MIMO decoding technique shows a substantially improved complexity–performance trade-off as compared to the state of the art techniques.