Fixed-complexity Sphere Encoder for Multi-user MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fixed-complexity sphere encoder (FSE) for multi-user MIMO systems that significantly reduces computational complexity and latency while maintaining near-optimal performance, enabling faster and more efficient wireless communication.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel FSE with a parallel tree-search structure, scalable performance-complexity tradeoff, and techniques to further reduce complexity, outperforming conventional encoders in MU-MIMO systems.

Findings

FSE requires only 11.5% of QRDM-E complexity in 4x4 MU-MIMO.

FSE achieves 7.5 times higher throughput than QRDM-E.

FSE maintains optimal diversity order with tolerable BER degradation.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a fixed-complexity sphere encoder (FSE) for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. The proposed FSE accomplishes a scalable tradeoff between performance and complexity. Also, because it has a parallel tree-search structure, the proposed encoder can be easily pipelined, leading to a tremendous reduction in the precoding latency. The complexity of the proposed encoder is also analyzed, and we propose two techniques that reduce it. Simulation and analytical results demonstrate that in a 4 by 4 MU-MIMO system, the proposed FSE requires only 11.5% of the computational complexity needed by the conventional QRD-M encoder (QRDM-E). Also, the encoding throughput of the proposed encoder is 7.5 times that of the QRDM-E with tolerable degradation in the BER performance, while achieving the optimum diversity order.