LAS Receiver Exploiting Channel Hardening for Massive MIMO Systems

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the channel hardens rapidly as the number of antennas grows. This means that the variance of the mutual information decreases rapidly relative to its mean. In this paper, we propose a likelihood ascent search (LAS) detector for massive MIMO systems that exploits the channel hardening behavior. In contrast to classical LAS receivers, the proposed channel hardening-exploiting LAS (CHE-LAS) does not require a matrix inversion. Therefore, the computational complexity of the proposed CHE-LAS is reduced compared to that of the conventional LAS algorithm. Moreover, simulation results show that the CHE-LAS detector achieves comparable performances as the LAS receiver.