V-BLAST Sphere Decoding with pre-searching using Genetic Algorithm

Improving system capacity is always a hotspot in mobile communication systems. As an important space-time code, Vertical Bell lab Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) code detection algorithm has attracted much attention in recent years. Sphere Decoding (SD) is comparable to ML in performance and much better than traditional detection algorithm of V-BLAST but it involves much more complicated computations. An improved SD algorithm using Genetic Algorithm (GA) pre-searching is presented in this paper based on the research on SD search route and GA characteristic. The algorithm tries to find new lattice inside of sphere by trying the near centre lattice based on GA pre-searching with intrinsic parallelism and heuristic searching therefore effectively reduces the complexity of SD.