Low-Complexity Signal Detection for Large-Scale MIMO in Optical Wireless Communications

Optical wireless communication (OWC) has been a rapidly growing research area in recent years. Applying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), particularly large-scale MIMO, into OWC is very promising to substantially increase spectrum efficiency. However, one challenging problem to realize such an attractive goal is the practical signal detection algorithm for optical MIMO systems, whereby the linear signal detection algorithm like minimum mean square error (MMSE) can achieve satisfying performance but involves complicated matrix inversion of large size. In this paper, we first prove a special property that the filtering matrix of the linear MMSE algorithm is symmetric positive definite for indoor optical MIMO systems. Based on this property, a low-complexity signal detection algorithm based on the successive overrelaxation (SOR) method is proposed to reduce the overall complexity by one order of magnitude with a negligible performance loss. The performance guarantee of the proposed SOR-based algorithm is analyzed from the following three aspects. First, we prove that the SOR-based algorithm is convergent for indoor large-scale optical MIMO systems. Second, we prove that the SOR-based algorithm with the optimal relaxation parameter can achieve a faster convergence rate than the recently proposed Neumann-based algorithm. Finally, a simple quantified relaxation parameter, which is independent of the receiver location and signal-to-noise ratio, is proposed to guarantee the performance of the SOR-based algorithm in practice. Simulation results verify that the proposed SOR-based algorithm can achieve the exact performance of the classical MMSE algorithm with a small number of iterations.