Combined nulling-canceling and maximum-likelihood detection for multiple antenna communication

Multiple transmit and receive antennas can increase the capacity, as well as increase reliability in wireless communication. In this paper, we propose a nulling-canceling based detection algorithm that performs selective maximum-likelihood decoding based on result of comparison between symbol estimates with different orderings. If the symbol estimates do not agree, then maximum-likelihood detection is performed on the discrepant symbols; otherwise, only nulling and canceling are performed. The proposed algorithm can achieve a better performance than the original nulling-canceling algorithm and requires a relatively small computational complexity increase.