Approximating the LLR Distribution for a Class of Soft-Output MIMO Detectors

We present approximations of the LLR distribution for a class of fixed-complexity soft-output MIMO detectors, such as the optimal soft detector and the soft-output via partial marginalization detector. More specifically, in a MIMO AWGN setting, we approximate the LLR distribution conditioned on the transmitted signal and the channel matrix with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Our main results consist of an analytical expression of the GMM model (including the number of modes and their corresponding parameters) and a proof that, in the limit of high SNR, this LLR distribution converges in probability towards a unique Gaussian distribution.