Approaching MIMO capacity using bitwise Markov Chain Monte Carlo detection

This paper examines near capacity performance of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) detectors for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The proposed MCMC detector (Log-MAP-tb b-MCMC) operates in a strictly bit-wise fashion and adopts Log-MAP algorithm with table look-up. When concatenated with an optimized low-density parity-check (LDPC) code, Log-MAP-tb b-MCMC can operate within 1.2-1.8 dB of the capacity of MIMO systems with 8 transmit/receive antennas at spectral efficiencies up to ¿ = 24 bits/channel use (b/ch). This result improves upon best performance achieved by turbo coded systems using list sphere decoding (LSD) detector by 2.3-3.8 dB, leading to nearly 50% reduction in the capacity gap. Detailed comparisons of the Log-MAP-tb b-MCMC with LSD based detectors demonstrate that MCMC detector is indeed the detector of choice for achieving channel capacity both in terms of performance and complexity.