Low-complexity iteration control for MIMO-BICM systems

Air bandwidth is a precious resource for wireless communication. Multiple-antenna (MIMO) systems enable an increase in channel capacity without increasing the air bandwidth. An iterative demapping and decoding at the receiver improves the communications performance remarkably. However, MIMO demapping and channel decoding have a high computational complexity. Energy consumption, latency and throughput of a hardware implementation strongly depend on the number of iterations. Iteration control techniques are very efficient to reduce the average number of iterations thus increasing decoder throughput and reducing energy consumption and average decoding latency. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first analysis of iteration control in MIMO bit interleaved coded modulation systems. We introduce a novel stopping metric for iteration control, which outperforms existing stopping metrics for middle and high signal-to-noise ratios. Additionally, we analyze state-of-the-art stopping metrics with respect to their algorithmic complexity in due consideration of a later hardware implementation.