Partitioned scheduling for sphere decoding with runtime constraints for practical MIMO communication systems

This paper presents a simple but effective scheduling scheme for sphere decoding (SD) with runtime constraints in multiple-input multiple-output communication systems. The proposed scheme imposes runtime constraints on SD to distribute the errors due to the early termination of SD. Because the distributed errors may be corrected effectively by forward error correction, the error-rate performance can be improved; experimental results show that the performance improvement is approximately 2 dB in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio to achieve a bit-error rate of 10^-4 in 4×4 16-QAM systems.