Very fast detection for rate-2 quasi-orthogonal STBCs

For an important and standard rate-two quasi-orthogonal space-time block code, we propose a very fast detection scheme which achieves a wide range of tradeoff between performance and complexity. In the proposed scheme, exploiting the special quasi-orthogonal structure of the code, we efficiently obtain multiple candidate constellation points around the maximum likelihood (ML) point. Furthermore, we develop a very fast sorting method for the multiple candidate points to further improve the detection speed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can perform very close to the maximum likelihood detection at an extremely low complexity.