Software-Defined Sphere Decoding for FPGA-Based MIMO Detection

Sphere Decoding (SD) is a highly effective detection technique for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless communications receivers, offering quasi-optimal accuracy with relatively low computational complexity as compared to the ideal ML detector. Despite this, the computational demands of even low-complexity SD variants, such as Fixed Complexity SD (FSD), remains such that implementation on modern software-defined network equipment is a highly challenging process, and indeed real-time solutions for MIMO systems such as 4 × 4 16-QAM 802.11n are unreported. This paper overcomes this barrier. By exploiting large-scale networks of fine-grained software-programmable processors on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), a series of unique SD implementations are presented, culminating in the only single-chip, real-time quasi-optimal SD for 4 × 4 16-QAM 802.11n MIMO. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the high performance software-defined architectures which enable these implementations exhibit cost comparable to dedicated circuit architectures.