Joint maximum likelihood detection and interference cancellation for MIMO/OFDM systems

Recently, considerable attention has been focused on the deployment of smart antenna technology, or spatial division multiplexing (SDM), as a promising and efficient method to increase wireless link capacity. A series of decoding algorithms for SDM systems have been proposed, among which maximum likelihood detection (MLD) is known for its best system performance. However, this is done at the expense of a very high computational load. We propose a reduced complexity combined MLD and successive interference cancellation (SIC) detection scheme for SDM systems to realize an increased diversity gain. The proposed architecture can significantly improve the overall system performance at a much lower computational complexity compared with MLD. In addition, it is shown that, when applied in an OFDM/MIMO system, the proposed architecture leads to significant performance enhancement with a much-reduced complexity compared with the optimum MLD architecture.