Faster Recursions in Sphere Decoding

Most of the calculations in standard sphere decoders are redundant in the sense that they either calculate quantities that are never used or calculate some quantities more than once. A new method, which is applicable to lattices as well as finite constellations, is proposed to avoid these redundant calculations while still returning the same result. Pseudocode is given to facilitate immediate implementation. Simulations show that the speed gain with the proposed method increases linearly with the lattice dimension. At dimension 60, the new algorithms avoid about 75% of all floating-point operations.