Efficient high-performance decoding for overloaded MIMO antenna systems

The practical challenge of capacity-achieving forward error-correcting codes (e.g., space-time Turbo codes) is overcoming the tremendous complexity associated by their optimal joint maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding. For this reason, iterative soft decoding has been studied to approach the optimal ML decoding performance at affordable complexity. In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, a judicious decoding strategy consists of two stages: 1) estimate the soft bits using list version of sphere decoding or its variants, and 2) update the soft bits through iterative soft decoding. A promising MIMO decoder is required to produce reliable soft-bit estimates at the first stage before iterative soft decoding is performed. In this paper, we focus on the overloaded (or fat) MIMO antenna systems where the number of receive antennas is less than the number of signals multiplexed in the spatial domain. In this scenario, the original form of sphere decoding is inherently not applicable and our aim is to generalize sphere decoding geometrically to cope with overloaded detection. The so-called slab-sphere decoding (SSD) proposed guarantees to obtain exact-ML hard detection while reducing complexity greatly. With the list-version of SSD, this paper proposes an efficient MIMO soft decoder, which can generate reliable soft-bit estimates at affordable complexity as inputs for iterative soft decoding for promising performance. A case study in the IEEE802.16 settings is carried out for performance evaluation.