A Robust Low-Complexity MIMO Detector for Rank 4 LTE/LTE-A Systems

TL;DR

This paper enhances a known MIMO detection algorithm for rank 4 LTE systems by introducing modifications for improved performance and developing an efficient hardware implementation with minimal multiplications.

Contribution

It introduces modifications to the RCSMLD detector for better performance in LTE rank 4 systems and proposes a hardware structure for efficient implementation.

Findings

Modified RCSMLD achieves excellent detection performance.

Hardware implementation requires very few multiplications.

Applicable to LTE/LTE-A systems with rank 4 MIMO.

Abstract

This paper deals with MIMO detection for rank 4 LTE systems. The paper revolves around a previously known detector [1, by Inkyu Lee, TCOM'2010] which we shall refer to as RCSMLD (Reduced-Constellation-Size-Maximum-Likelihood-Detector). However, a direct application of the scheme in [1, by Inkyu Lee, TCOM'2010] to LTE/LTE-A rank 4 test cases results in unsatisfactory performance. The first contribution of the paper is to introduce several modifications that can jointly be applied to the basic RCSMLD scheme which, taken together, result in excellent performance. Our second contribution is the development of a highly efficient hardware structure for RCSMLD that allows for an implementation with very few multiplications.