A Fixed-Complexity MIMO Detector Based on the Complex Sphere Decoder

A new detection algorithm for uncoded multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) systems based on the complex version of the sphere decoder (SD) is presented in this paper. The algorithm performs a fixed number of operations to detect the symbols, independent of the noise level. The algorithm achieves this by combining a novel channel matrix preprocessing with a search through a small subset of the complete receive constellation. Simulation results show it has only a very small bit error ratio (BER) degradation compared to the original SD while being suited for a fully-pipelined hardware implementation due to its fixed complexity