A Fixed-Complexity Soft-MIMO Detector via Parallel Candidate Adding Scheme and its FPGA Implementation

This paper presents a fully parallel candidate adding (PCA) scheme for the soft-output sphere decoder, which can be used in turbo-coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to provide extrinsic soft information to the outer decoder for more robust decoding. The PCA assisted MIMO detector has been implemented and validated on a state-of-the-art Xilinx FPGA device. The results obtained indicate that the proposed scheme is clearly suitable for a highly parallel and fully pipelined hardware implementation which outperforms alternative algorithms with respect to the resource requirements and the decoding latency.