Differential Evolution Algorithm Aided Minimum Symbol Error Rate Multi-User Detection for Multi-User OFDM/SDMA Systems

A Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm assisted Minimum Symbol Error Ratio (MSER) Multi-User Detection (MUD) scheme is proposed for multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) aided Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing / Space Division Multiple Access (OFDM/SDMA) systems. Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) is employed in most wireless standards by virtue of providing a high throughput. The MSER Cost Function (CF) may be deemed to be the most relevant one for QAM, but finding its minimum is challenging. Hence we propose a sophisticated DE assisted MSER-MUD scheme, which directly minimizes the SER CF of multi-user OFDM/SDMA systems employing QAM. Furthermore, the effects of the DE assisted MSER-MUD´s algorithmic parameters, namely those of the population size P_s, of the scaling factor λ and of the crossover probability C_r on the number of DE generations required for attaining convergence were investigated in our simulations. This allowed us to directly quantify their complexity. The simulation results also demonstrate that the proposed DE assisted MSER-MUD scheme significantly outperforms the conventional MMSE-MUD in term of the system´s overall BER and it is capable of narrowing its BER performance discrepancy with respect to the optimal Maximum Likelihood (ML) MUD to about 4dB, while requiring about 200 times less CF evaluations compared to the optimal ML-MUD scheme.