Performance and complexity comparison of near-optimal MIMO decoders

Wireless communications standards increasingly use multiple antenna systems for increasing the system throughput. We consider the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard and provide detailed comparisons, in terms of hardware complexity, between two near-optimal decoders for such a system. In particular, we compare the K-Best and the selective spanning with fast enumeration (SSFE) decoders. For equal BER performance, we find that the K-best requires a smaller number of operations, particularly for the large decoder sizes needed to satisfy the conformance specifications in practical wireless communication standards.