Multiple-Symbol Differential Detection:V-BLAST vs. Sphere Decoding

Multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD) has been used to detect transmitted data over Rayleigh fading channels without channel state information by jointly processing groups of N received symbols to detect N-1 data symbols. By increasing the value of N, the probability of error would be decreased but search space for the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator would be increased as well, so a low complexity algorithm is of great desire. In this letter we compare the complexity and performance of V-BLAST vs. sphere decoding and one low complexity SD algorithm.