A low complexity architecture of the V-BLAST system

The V-BLAST architecture has been proposed as an extremely spectral efficient tool for wireless communications. However, owing to the intensive computation involved, it may be difficult to implement this architecture for high data rate communication system. We propose the replacement of the optimal decoding order by a suboptimal one and the utilization of the Gram-Schmitt orthogonalization (GSO) to substitute the computation of the pseudo-inverse in finding the weight vectors. These modifications significantly reduce the total number of arithmetic operations required to obtain the weight vectors and the decoding order in V-BLAST with virtually no performance degradation. In slowly time-varying fading channels, the proposed method can further reduce the amount of computation required by exploiting the time correlation between the channel gains