Trade-off between performance and complexity with various candidates in LDPC coded MIMO-OFDM iterative decoding

In the context of MAP estimate performance and comparable complexity, LDPC-coded MIMO-OFDM systems are investigated widely. Specifically, in case of iterative detection using LSD (list sphere decoding), there is trade-off between detection performance and complexity according to the number of candidates N_can. As a system model with 802.11n wireless LAN, simulation results show that performance saturation with candidates over 64, but long latency with more than 16 candidates. Hence, proper N_can can be chosen between 8 and 16 considering performance degradation and hardware issues