Hybrid detectors for wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with code division multiplexing systems based on reliability information

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with code division multiplexing (OFDM-CDM) is attractive for the next generation high-speed wireless systems due to the fact that the performance of OFDM-CDM systems can be considerably improved by employing a joint detection scheme such as the maximum likelihood (ML) detector. However, the complexity of the ML detector increases rapidly as the number of orthogonal spreading codes and/or the number of bits per modulation symbol increase. In this study, the authors introduce a unified detection model and propose two hybrid detectors, which combine zero forcing (ZF) with successive interference cancellation (SIC) and sphere detection (SD) algorithms, respectively. After obtaining the initial solution from the front-end ZF receiver, the proposed back-end algorithms are adopted to extend the potential solution list and search for the final result. The objective is to utilise the combination of a simplified linear equaliser and a comprehensive detection scheme to achieve enhanced performance and offer alternatives to the more complex and channel-estimation-sensitive minimum mean squared error (MMSE) scheme. The results show that the proposed hybrid detectors are able to achieve superior performance compared to the MMSE scheme and provides a significant performance improvement compared to the conventional OFDM counterpart.