An Enhanced V-BLAST System for Reduced-Complexity Tree Searching

This paper presents a new vertical Bell labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) transmission scheme for developing reduced-complexity receiver. It can significantly alleviate the receiver complexity in sense of tree searching of the QRD-M algorithm. The new V-BLAST system is designed by two criteria: minimum performance loss and maximum complexity reduction. In a 4 times 4 V-BLAST system with 16 bps/Hz, the former can lessen about 51% metric computations with 1.0 dB performance degradation, compared with the conventional V-BLAST system with the QRD-M algorithm. The latter can achieve approximately 65% complexity reduction at the expense of 3.0 dB performance penalty.