Low-Complexity Optimal Detection for Hybrid Space-Time Block Coding and Spatial Multiplexing

The combination of space-time block codes (STBC) and spatial multiplexing (SM) schemes has the advantages of diversity gain and high data rate. For such STBC/SM hybrid systems, we propose a new detector based on the block structure of STBC and the sphere decoder (SD). By employing the SD, optimal detection is performed with computational complexity much less than the brute-force maximum likelihood (ML) search. Simulation results show that the new decoder significantly outperforms the previously developed zero-forcing (ZF) group/STBC detector, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) group/STBC detector, and the MMSE and ML detectors for equivalent SM systems.