Design and implementation of symbol detector for MIMO spatial multiplexing systems

In this paper, we propose an efficient symbol detection algorithm for multiple-input multiple-output spatial multiplexing (MIMO-SM) systems and present its design and implementation results. By enhancing the error performance of the first detected symbol that causes error propagation, the proposed algorithm achieves a considerable performance gain compared with the conventional sorted QR decomposition (SQRD) based detection and the ordered successive detection (OSD) algorithms. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed detection algorithm is evaluated by a simulation. In the case of a 16QAM MIMO-SM system with 4 transmit and 4 receive (4 × 4) antennas, at BER = 10^-3 the proposed algorithm results in a gain improvement of about 2.513.5 dB over the previous algorithms. The proposed detection algorithm was designed in a hardware description language (HDL) and synthesized to gate-level circuits using 0.18 μm 1.8 V CMOS standard cell library. The results show that the proposed algorithm can be implemented without increasing the hardware costs significantly.