Performance evaluation of sphere decoding over Nakagami-m fading MIMO channels

It has been shown that communication systems with multiple transmission and reception antennas (MIMO) are suitable for achieving high spectral efficiency. Assuming full channel knowledge at the receiver near-ML performance at low complexity can be achieved by so-called sphere decoding. However achievement of such a complexity and performance highly depends on techniques used in the decoder (like tree search techniques, initial choice of the sphere radius methods and so on). On the other hand, the performance of the sphere decoding is restricted by fading caused by multipath propagation. As most of the analysis of complexity and performance of sphere decoding so far have been based on Rayleigh fading channels, in this paper complexity and performance of the sphere decoding over Nakagami-m fading MIMO channels are evaluated.