High performance fixed effort MIMO detector

A reduced search sphere decoder (RS-SD) for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems is proposed. Contrarily to the sphere decoder (SD), where the maximum likelihood (ML) solution is achieved with a variable complexity, the RS-SD algorithm will be performed over a fixed number of candidates, determined according to pre-computed search probabilities. Due to the intelligent candidate selection strategy, the RS-SD shows a performance close to the SD and a superior performance compared to some commonly used fixed effort sphere decoders, resulting in an efficient use of the hardware resources.