The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)

LINEAR MIMO RECEIVERS VS. TREE SEARCH DETECTION:

A PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OVERVIEW
Clemens Michalke, Ernesto Zimmermann and Gerhard Fettweis
Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications Systems, TU Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany

A BSTRACT cessive interference cancellation (and variations) to capacity-

Next generation wireless systems will use a combination of
large system bandwidths and multiple antennas (MIMO) to de-
liver very high data rate services. The efficient demodulation
of MIMO signals at the receiver can be a challenging task. In
this paper, we study the gains achievable by using capacity-
approaching tree search MIMO detection algorithms, for dif-
ferently parameterized OFDM system setups and channel sce-
narios. Our results indicate that the high amount of diversity
typically available in broadband MIMO-OFDM systems to-
gether with the use of low rate channel coding allows achiev-
ing very good performance using even simple linear MMSE
detection. In iterative receiver approaches, the combination of
initial linear MMSE detection and subsequent soft interference
cancellation performs within 1-2dB of the respective perfor-
mance bound. The complexity involved in tree search detec-
tion techniques provides benefits mainly in very low-diversity
environments, or if high rate channel coding is used together
with higher order modulation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
As engineers strive to satisfy the demand for ever higher data
rates in future wireless systems, they are faced with a serious
challenge: regulation and other factors render radio frequency
spectrum a scarce and thus valuable resource. Multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) systems allow using this resource
very efficiently by multiplexing several data streams into the
same time-frequency bin [1]. If channel state information (CSI)
of sufficient quality is available and appropriately exploited at
the transmitter side, the MIMO channel can be decoupled into
a set of parallel SISO channels (this is referred to as SVD-
MIMO, or Eigenmode signaling), thereby substantially reduc-
ing the complexity of the spatio-temporal processing at the re-
ceiver [2]. However, in a number of scenarios “blind” MIMO
transmission schemes such as the classical BICM approach [3]
have to be used: whenever CSI at the transmitter is either un-
approaching tree search techniques (sphere detection, list se-
quential detection), to name but a few. By using feedback
from the outer channel decoder in an iterative “Turbo-MIMO”
setup, performance remarkably close to APP detection has
been achieved with a number of different detection techniques.
The huge amount of available options makes it difficult to
determine how much gain is achievable by using more ad-
vanced detection strategies, and which algorithm should be
chosen for a practical implementation. The answer to this ques-
tion depends on a large number of parameters, such as the avail-
able amount of diversity, the channel coding rate, the size of
the modulation alphabet, and last but not least on the question
whether single-shot detection-decoding or Turbo-MIMO is em-
ployed at the receiver. In this paper we will present results for
a number of relevant application scenarios, to determine where
it makes sense to invest computational effort in the use of ad-
vanced detection techniques, and where simple linear detection
still provides a good performance-complexity trade-off.
The remainder of this document is structured as follows:
Section II. introduces the system model and principles of (iter-
ative) MIMO detection. Section III. presents a selection of ap-
plication scenarios, in terms of system setups as well as channel
models. In Section IV. we discuss the non-iterative case, before
we draw attention to the Turbo-MIMO case in Section V.. We
finally draw conclusions in Section VI..
II. MIMO D ETECTION
A. The MIMO Detection Problem
We consider a MIMO-BICM system with MT transmit and NR
receive antennas, as depicted in Figure 1: the information bits
are encoded, interleaved, partitioned into blocks ci of MT · L
bits and mapped onto vector symbols xi whose components are
drawn from some complex constellation C of cardinality 2L .
Binary Outer Constellation
Source
u
Encoder
e c
Mapper

available (due to missing CSI feedback in the FDD mode), or Rate R Interleaver
x
...
H
cannot be straightforwardly applied (e.g. due to non-reciprocal ...
RF chains and interference scenarios in the TDD mode [4]). Hard Decision
AWGN n
y
The correct separation of the transmitted signals at the re- Binary SISO
LA,Dec
-1
LE,Det
MIMO
Sink Decoder Detector
ceiver is a significant challenge in such an open-loop MIMO
setup. Optimal a posteriori probability (APP) detection of
LE,Dec LA,Det
the signals is well known to require an effort growing expo-
nentially in the (raw) spectral efficiency – our figure of merit
for using MIMO. Recent years have therefore seen an intense Figure 1: Transmission model with BICM-MIMO transmitter
research effort to develop detection algorithms which pro- and (iterative) MIMO receiver.
vide a good performance-complexity trade-off. The plethora
of proposals ranges from simple linear receivers over suc- We focus on the case of broadband MIMO-OFDM systems

1-4244-0330-8/06/$20.00
2006
c IEEE
The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)
(examples will be given in the following section). Transmission
hence takes place over flat fading subcarriers. In the equivalent
base-band model, the signal yi received on time-frequency re-
source i is given by:
yi = Hi xi + ni , (1)
where Hi ∈ CNR ×MT is the channel matrix whose entries are
normalized such that E{|hk,l |2 } = 1 – each subchannel is pas-
sive. ni ∈ CNR ×1 is receiver noise whose components are
zero mean i.i.d. complex Gaussian random variables with vari-
ance N0 . The transmit energy is distributed equally over the
antennas (which is the optimal power allocation strategy in the
absence of CSI at the transmitter). The signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR) at each receive antenna is given by SNR = Es /N0 .
The task of the MIMO detector is to generate reliability in-
formation on the code bits cl of each received vector symbol
y (we drop the index i for ease of notation), given the channel
state information and optional a priori knowledge from the de-
coder. This soft output is typically produced in the form of so
called log-likelihood ratios (LLRs):

global optimum and is prone to error propagation, especially
p (y|x(c)) · P [c]
P [cl = +1|y] x(c)∈Xl+1
L(cl |y) := ln = ln

P [cl = −1|y] p (y|x(c)) · P [c]
x(c)∈Xl−1
 
− y − Hx
2 
≈ max + ln P [cl ] (2)
x(c)∈Xl+1 N0
l ber of decision errors in the cancellation step. This problem
 
− y − Hx
2 
− max + ln P [cl ] ,
x(c)∈Xl−1 N0
l on the reliability of detection. The variance of these soft es-
where Xl±1 denotes the set of 2M ·L−1 symbols x(c) for which
cl = ±1 and the second line follows from the application of the
so called “maxLog approximation”. Evaluating the two max-
operations in (2) by brute-force maximum a posteriori proba-
bility detection (max-APP, or MAP) evidently requires an ef-
fort growing linear with the cardinality of Xl±1 and thus ex-
ponentially in the number of transmitted bits per vector sym-
bol. This is clearly infeasible for higher spectral efficiencies.
However, there exist low complexity algorithms that show very
good performance in a number of relevant scenarios, at only
a small fraction of the full MAP complexity. We will discuss
some examples in the following.
B. Detection Algorithms – A Short Overview
Linear equalization is the most simple technique – it sup-
presses the interference among layers, thereby turning the
MIMO detection problem into a set of MT parallel SISO detec-
tion problems and hence substantially reducing the complexity
of demodulation. There are several drawbacks to this approach:
the first is the potentially severe noise enhancement, together
with a reduction of the spatial diversity order to 1. The second
is that, due to the full decoupling of the layers, we can no longer
achieve MAP, but only ML performance. The advantage is that
the noise enhancement can be precisely characterized, which
helps a lot whenever there is enough frequency (or time) diver-
sity available to code over the “bad” channel realizations with
strong noise enhancement.
If close-to-optimal detection performance is the target, tree
search based techniques should be employed. Based on the
recognition that only a few hypotheses in Xl±1 maximize each
of the respective terms in (2), these back-substitution based al-
gorithms construct a subset list L ⊂ X to determine the LLRs.
This subset list should on the one hand include only a frac-
tion of the elements from X – to minimize complexity, but on
the other hand be large enough to allow approaching the true
detector L-values as closely as possible – to maximize perfor-
mance. Examples of such schemes are list sphere [5, 6] (LSD),
list sequential [7] (LISS) and iterative tree search [8] (ITS) de-
tection. The performance-complexity trade-off can be tuned
by choosing the number of entries in the list L. List sphere and
list sequential detection require a certain number of full length
candidates to be found – the detection complexity is therefore
variable. The M-algorithm based ITS [8] fixes the number of
paths which are retained in each layer. The advantage is a fixed
detection complexity, but the algorithm will no longer find the
for low values of M .
A special case of the M-Algorithm with M = 1 is widely
known as successive interference cancellation (SIC) – in each
layer, only the best path for this depth is retained. In our BICM
setup, such detectors generally suffer from error propagation
effects, as the coding gain cannot be used to decrease the num-
can be somewhat reduced by using soft cancellation (SoftSIC)
– subtracting not hard decided symbols, but soft symbols based
timates can be used to determine the residual noise after the
cancellation step [9]. However, the error propagation can only
be treated statistically, so the produced LLRs are of relatively
low quality, especially for higher order modulation.
As a prerequisite for all tree search based methods, the chan-
nel matrix has to be decomposed to obtain a matrix of upper
triangular structure – either via a Cholesky factorization, or
a QR decomposition. As detecting reliably received signals
first decreases complexity for list sphere and sequential detec-
tion [6, 10] and increases performance for iterative tree search
and SoftSIC, a sorted QR decomposition [11] should be used.
This approach also facilitates the extension of tree search based
detection methods to the MMSE case [12]. The importance of
MMSE preprocessing for solving the MIMO detection problem
efficiently has been stressed in [6].
C. Tree Search Detection vs. Linear MMSE – Expected Gains
To obtain a first “educated guess” on the potential gains from
using tree search detection, we take a look at the MIMO capac-
ity for the high and low diversity case. Figure 2 shows results
(ergodic and 1% outage capacity, respectively) for a spatially
uncorrelated 4x4 MIMO system. Depicted are the capacities
of a system using CSI at the transmitter (SVD-MIMO, Water-
filling), and a system without CSI at the transmitter (MIMO-
BICM) using optimal vs. simple linear MMSE detection.
The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)

30
∆ >> 1000
Spectral Efficiency [bit / channel use]

(ergodic capacity)
WIGWAM 802.11n LTE
MIMO Configuration 4x4 4x4 2x2
System bandwidth [MHz] 100 20 5
20 FFT Bandwidth[MHz] 160 20 5
Capacity
w/
CSI@Tx FFT size 1024 64 512
Capacity Used subcarriers 596 48 450
w/o
CSI@Tx ∆=3 Subcarrier spacing [kHz] 156.25 312.50 9.77
10 (1% outage
capacity) Useful OFDM symb. [µs] 6.4 3.2 102.4
Linear Cyclic prefix [µs] 0.8 0.8 10.0
MMSE
Total OFDM symb. [µs] 7.2 4.0 112.4
∆ ... diversity order
0 Table 1: Physical layer parameters of the MIMO-OFDM sys-
0 10 SNR [dB] 20 30
tems used for the performance evaluation.

Figure 2: Ergodic and outage capacities for an uncorrelated 4x4 For channel coding, we use a Turbo Code with (13R , 15)
MIMO system using different receiver strategies. constituent convolutional codes, 8 internal iterations of
maxLogMAP decoding, and scaling of the extrinsic messages
The gains from exploiting CSI at the transmitter are quite (0.5 in the 1st , 1.0 in the 8th and 0.75 in all other iterations).
low in the high diversity environment (ergodic capacity results), The code is punctured to rate 1/2 (by puncturing each other
at the SNR values typically considered for MIMO transmis- parity bit), and to rate 3/4 using the pattern from [15]. We use
sion (10 dB and beyond) – another motivation for considering Gray mapped 4-/16- and 64-QAM transmission.
a simple BICM transmitter architecture. The offset between
linear MMSE and optimal detection is no larger than 5dB in B. Propagation Scenarios
this scenario, even for very high spectral efficiencies. For a In broadband MIMO-OFDM systems, all three degrees of free-
spectral efficiency of 4 bit/channel use (rate 1/2 coded 4-QAM dom in electromagnetic wave propagation – space, frequency
transmission) it is only 2dB – linear detection can hence be ex- and time – become available. The amount of fading and hence
pected to yield very good results for lower spectral efficiencies the level of exploitable diversity, however, is influenced by the
and high diversity environments. propagation environment and transmission system parameters.
For the low diversity case (diversity order ∆ = 3), the off- The level of frequency diversity gained from multipath fad-
set between linear and near-optimal tree search detection can ing depends on the ratio of the system bandwidth BS to the
be expected to be significantly higher, as is evident from the channel’s characteristic coherence bandwidth BC . As a rule of
results in Figure 2 – the loss in spatial diversity then leads to thumb, the coherence bandwidth can be estimated from the de-
a strong performance penalty for linear detection techniques. lay τmax of the latest significant arriving multipath component:
Note, however, that for spectral efficiencies of 8 bits per chan- BC ≈ 1/τmax . Equivalently, the amount of temporal diversity
nel use (rate 1/2 coding, 16-QAM) and below, the loss is again can be estimated by relating the symbol period TS to the chan-
only in the order of 3-4dB. nel coherence time TC , which is proportional to the inverse of
the maximum occurring Doppler frequency. However, in or-
III. A PPLICATION S CENARIOS der to avoid inter-carrier-interference due to Doppler spread,
the subcarrier spacing – which is the inverse of the symbol pe-
A. Broadband MIMO-OFDM Systems riod TS – is typically much larger than the maximum Doppler
Next generation wireless systems will not only use MIMO to frequency. Hence, the channel remains almost unchanged over
increase spectral efficiency, they will also use large bandwidths several OFDM symbols (TS  TC ) and the amount of tempo-
to further boost data rates. In order to efficiently equalize fre- ral diversity is very limited.
quency selective broadband channels, OFDM is typically used. Multiple antennas offer usage of the directional properties
Examples for MIMO-OFDM systems in the short range wire- of the channel, i.e., spatial diversity. When using spatial mul-
less LAN area are IEEE 802.11n, and the physical layer pro- tiplexing, the number of non-zero singular values (or Eigen-
posals for the WIGWAM [13] and the WINNER project [14], modes) of the channel matrix Hi defines the number of streams
which aim at achieving data rates of up to 1 GBit/s in 100 MHz that can be simultaneously supported by the channel. In the
bandwidth. For the wide area cellular case, MIMO-OFDM has absence of any correlation, the average unordered singular val-
been proposed at least as a downlink solution in 3GPP long ues exhibit the same value and the maximum number of par-
term evolution (LTE). allel signals can be transmitted. The ratio between the largest
In the remainder of this paper, we study the performance of and the smallest singular value – the Eigenvalue spread σEV
different MIMO detection algorithms using a WIGWAM sys- – can thus serve as measure for the capability of the channel
tem, a 802.11n based system, and a “LTE-like” system as ex- to support spatial multiplexing. High Eigenvalue spread cor-
amples for a high, medium and low diversity environment, re- responds to high antenna correlation at either the transmitter,
spectively. The system parameters are summarized in Table 1. the receiver or both. In such cases, beamforming instead of
The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)

spatial multiplexing should be applied, or the number of data IV. S INGLE S HOT D ETECTION -D ECODING
streams/antennas has to be adapted to the channel conditions.
A. Sphere Detection vs. Iterative Tree Search
We first study the performance of Sphere detection and ITS,
LTE in order to obtain reasonable configurations for the follow-
SCM 1 WIGWAM ing evaluations in which they will serve as upper performance
LTE SCM 2 bounds (ML and MAP bound in the non-iterative and iterative
Winner C1 case, respectively). Figure 4 shows results for different num-
LTE bers of paths retained in the tree search, using a WIGWAM
Winner D1 WIGWAM OFDM system and rate 1/2 and 3/4 coded 16-QAM modulation
802.11n 802.11n B in the 802.11n E channel scenario. Results for linear MMSE
802.11n B WIGWAM detection are plotted as reference.
802.11n 802.11n E
802.11n D 0 Iterative Tree Search vs. Sphere Detection
10
16−QAM,
R = 3/4
c

Figure 3: Classification of system-channel combinations in the 16−QAM,

R = 1/2
c
Eigenvalue spread - frequency diversity pane BLER −1
10

In Figure 3 combinations of the system approaches from

the previous section and different channel models are evalu-
ated regarding the available frequency diversity and capability
MMSE−LD
of transmitting parallel data in spatial multiplexing. System- ITS (M−Algorithm), M=32
ITS (M−Algorithm), M=8
channel combinations in the lower right region are well suited Sphere Detection, 16 candidates
for MIMO-OFDM transmission, whereas points in the upper −2
10
Sphere Detection, 2 candidates
10 12 14 16 18 20
left part represent the low diversity case. SNR [dB]
The models C1 and D1 from the European IST WINNER
project [16] represent further developments of the SCM chan- Figure 4: Comparison of the performance of Sphere Detection
nels [17] (spatial extensions of the ITU channel models Pedes- and ITS for rate 1/2 and 3/4 coded 16-QAM transmission, us-
trian A – SCM 1, Vehicular A – SCM 2 and Pedestrian B – ing the WIGWAM OFDM system parameters, 4x4 MIMO, and
SCM 3). They provide moderate frequency diversity with re- the IEEE 802.11n E channel model.
spect to the applied system and have moderate to high Eigen-
value spread. The channel models from the IEEE 802.11 TGn While the hard output from tree search techniques is always
[18] are designed for indoor as well as outdoor transmission of higher quality than that of the linear detector, the quality
and are spatial extensions of the HiperLAN channels. As can of the soft output depends crucially on the number of candi-
be seen from Figure 3 their Eigenvalue spread is very small. dates found. This issue is illustrated by the results in Figure 4.
Hence spatial multiplexing is a reasonable MIMO strategy. The For a low number of retained paths, counter-hypotheses will be
highest amount of frequency diversity is available when using missing for some bits (Xl±1 ∩ L = ∅), leading to a low quality
the WIGWAM system design in combination with the IEEE of the soft output for those bits (LLR clipping [5, 8] is typi-
802.11n E channel model. cally used to address this issue). The results in Figure 4 show
that setting M = 32 for ITS and finding the 16 best candidates
τmax BC σEV Note using the Sphere detector already provides good results, and
802.11n D 390ns 2.5MHz 3 Hiperlan A the performance does not improve significantly if we increase
802.11n E 730ns 1.25MHz 2.7 Hiperlan B complexity any further (gains are substantially below 0.5dB).
WINNER C1 410ns 2.5MHz 41 suburban Regarding the relative complexity of Sphere detection and
WINNER D1 170ns 6MHz 6.2 rural ITS, the former has a lower average, but a much higher max-
imum complexity. Taking the case of rate 1/2 coded trans-
Table 2: Characteristic parameters for the investigated channel mission from Figure 4 as an example, the number of extended
models nodes for ITS (using the multi-level-property of Gray mapping,
for details refer to [8]) is P = 197 for M = 32. Four branch
Table 2 lists the characteristics of the channels used for per- metrics are calculated for each extended node, resulting in a to-
formance evaluation in the next section, such as the maxi- tal of around 800 branch metric computations. For the case of
mum excess delay, the coherence bandwidth and the Eigen- Sphere detection, an average of only P = 70 node extensions
value spread. A remark to environment or channel model pre- are required in the waterfall region around SNR=12dB. The av-
cursor is also given. The channels are marked in Figure 3 with erage number of tree branches is only around 140, as the search
a filled red circle. radius strongly limits the search tree. However, the worst case
The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)
number of branch metric computations lies in the order of 3000
– almost 4 times the figure for ITS. In the following, ITS with
M = 32 will serve as our performance bound.
B. The Medium Diversity Case
Figure 5 shows the performance of a linear MMSE detector
for a 802.11n system on the 802.11n D channel. For all cases
of rate 1/2 coded transmission, the offset to the ITS bound is
in the order of 1dB, confirming our expectation from Section
II.C.. The results for higher spectral efficiencies show an off-
set of 3-5dB. Comparing the linear detection results for rate
1/2 coded 64-QAM transmission and rate 3/4 coded 16-QAM
transmission (which achieve the same spectral efficiency) show
that in the case of linear detection, it is advantageous to use low
rate channel coding together with higher order modulation.
0 Single Shot Linear Detection in High Diversity Scenario
10
4−QAM, 16−QAM,
16−QAM,
BLER
R = 1/2 R = 1/2 R = 3/4
−1 c c
10 c 10
64−QAM,
Linear Detection
R = 1/2
−2 ML Bound (ITS, M=32) c
10
0 5 10 15 20
SNR [dB]
Figure 5: Performance of MMSE linear detection vs. ITS
(M=32) as ML bound for a 4x4 MIMO 802.11n system on
the IEEE 802.11n D channel and spectral efficiencies from 4
bit/s/Hz (QPSK, rate 1/2) up to 18 bit/s/Hz (64-QAM, rate 3/4).
For tree search detection, the picture looks quite different.
As the modulation order increases, there is an increased loss in
(extrinsic) information if no a priori knowledge on the informa-
tion bits is available (cf. equation (2)) and the offset between
ML and MAP bound increases. Moreover, the offset between
MIMO (outage) capacity (which is defined by the spectral effi-
ciency only) and the MAP bound also grows, as there is an in-
creased mismatch between a powerful outer code and the MAP
detector [19]. It is hence preferable to use high rate channel
coding in conjunction with lower order modulation. The de-
tection strategy employed at the receiver should hence be taken
into account when choosing the modulation-coding scheme at
the transmitter.
Comparing the gain of ITS over linear MMSE detection in
Figure 4 and Figure 5 illustrates that even the 20MHz mode
of the 802.11n system in combination with the slightly less
frequency-selective 802.11n D channel still exhibits sufficient
diversity in order for the linear MMSE receiver to achieve quite
decent performance. The offset to the ML bound increases only
slightly (by ≈ 1dB for code rate 3/4).
C. The Low Diversity Case
Results for the low diversity case are presented in Figure 6.
There is almost no frequency diversity available (cf. the
16-QAM rate 3/4 results) and the Eigenmode spread is quite
high. Therefore, only a 2x2 MIMO setup is used – for which
the linear detector still shows reasonable performance. For
4-QAM transmission, the reduced noise enhancement (due to
MMSE filtering) is enough to bring the linear detector within
only 1-2dB of the ML bound. However, the reduction of the
diversity order to 1 will evidently cause the offset between ML
and linear detection to grow substantially for low target block
error rates. The use of advanced detection strategies is hence
very attractive for modulation orders of 16-QAM and beyond,
where the achievable gains increase to over 5dB, for a block
error rate of 1%.
0 Single Shot Linear Detection in Low Diversity Channel
10
64−QAM,
R = 3/4
c 16−QAM,
R = 3/4
c
BLER
−1
4−QAM, 16−QAM,
R = 1/2 R = 1/2
c c
Linear Detection
−2 ML Bound (ITS, M=16)
10
25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR [dB]
Figure 6: Performance of the MMSE linear detection vs.
ITS (M=16) as ML bound for the LTE-like system using 2x2
MIMO on the WINNER D1 channel, for spectral efficiencies
from 2 bit/s/Hz up to 6 bit/s/Hz.
V. I TERATIVE D ETECTION -D ECODING
A. Linear Detection with SoftSIC “Post-Processing”
There is only little gain if linear receivers are used in an it-
erative detection-decoding setup. In order to improve perfor-
mance, the detector must use the information provided by the
decoder to suppress interference. The combination of linear
detection in the first iteration and SoftSIC (cf. Section II.B.)
in the following iterations is very attractive, especially in com-
bination with the complexity reduction methods proposed for
the SoftSIC in [20]. The SoftSIC can then be seen as a kind of
“post-processing” using the decoder to improve the soft output
of the linear detector.
When doing iterative detection-decoding, it is important to
match the EXIT chart transfer characteristic of the inner MIMO
detector and the outer channel decoder. Since the transfer char-
acteristic of the MIMO detector has a significant positive slope
even for Gray mapped transmission, it is preferable to use a
(slightly) weaker channel code. We therefore used memory 2
The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)
(7R , 5) constituent convolutional codes for the rate 1/2 Turbo
Code. The reduction in the code memory from 3 to 2 allows
doubling the number of internal decoder iterations to 16 with-
out increasing the total decoding complexity. This approach
fits very well with our idea of post-processing for the linear de-
tector: applying the proposals from [19], we use a total of 3
detector-decoder iterations and allow the decoder to distribute
the 16 internal decoder iterations as needed, based on the a pri-
ori knowledge at its input. The only complexity increase in
our iterative setup now stems from the two applications of the
SoftSIC detector, which is quite small, compared to the effort
required for a tree search based detector.
B. The High Diversity Case
Results for a scenario with a high amount of frequency and spa-
tial diversity are presented in Figure 7. For the case of rate 1/2
coded 4/16-QAM transmission, the proposed linear detection
with post-processing performs within 1dB of the MAP bound.
Note that the decoding effort invested is only half that for the
MAP setup (where a total of 32 internal decoder iterations are
used), and the detection complexity is negligible compared to
that of the ITS detector used as performance bound.
0 Iterative Detection Methods in High Diversity Channel
10
4−QAM, 16−QAM,
BLER
−1 R = 1/2 R = 3/4
c
c
10
Linear Detection
ML Bound (ITS, M=32) 16−QAM,
1xMMSE−LD + 2xSoftSIC R = 1/2
−2 MAP Bound (4xITS, M =32) c A.
10
0 5 10 15
SNR [dB]
Figure 7: Performance of MMSE linear detection with SoftSIC
post-processing vs. 4xITS (M=32) as MAP bound, for a 4x4
MIMO WIGWAM system on the IEEE 802.11n E channel and
for spectral efficiencies from 4 bit/s/Hz up to 12 bit/s/Hz.
For the case of higher rate channel coding, the offset between
the proposed scheme and the ITS/MAP bound is around 2-3dB
– falling short of achieving even ML performance. However,
the offset to the ML bound is only 1dB, so this approach might
be a valid alternative to single-shot detection-decoding using a
more powerful detection strategy.
C. The Low Diversity Case
For this scenario, we simulated the performance of the LTE-
like 2x2 MIMO system in a suburban channel scenario with
very high correlation at the BS side (WINNER channel model
C1, angular spread of only 5◦ ). The frequency diversity order
is also very low, around 2 (cf. the results for the linear de-
tector and 16-QAM transmission). Again, using a simple lin-
ear MMSE detection works very well for the case of 4-QAM
transmission: linear detection with post-processing achieves
ML performance and comes within 1dB of the MAP bound,
as shown in figure 8. For the case of higher order modula-
tion, more advanced detection strategies should be used, as
only these are able to extract the (limited) spatial diversity from
the channel and thus show high gains over linear detection for
low target block error rates.
0 Iterative Detection in Low Diversity Scenario
10
16−QAM,
R = 1/2
c
4−QAM,
BLER
−1
10
R = 1/2
c
ML Bound (ITS, M = 16)
Linear detection
MAP Bound (4xITS, M = 16)
−2 1xMMSE−LD + 2xSoftSIC
10
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR [dB]
Figure 8: Performance of MMSE linear detection with Soft-
SIC post-processing vs. 4xITS (M=16) as MAP bound for the
LTE-like system (2x2 MIMO, WINNER C1 channel model)
and spectral efficiencies of 2 bit/s/Hz (QPSK, rate 1/2) and 4
bit/s/Hz (16-QAM, rate 1/2).
VI. C OMPLEXITY E VALUATION AND C ONCLUSIONS
Performance-Complexity Analysis
20
To set the SNR gains achievable by using advanced detection
techniques in relation to the increase in required effort, we
analyzed the complexity required for ITS, linear and SoftSIC
detection. Figure 9 summarizes the performance-complexity
trade-offs achievable by ITS and linear MMSE detection (with
and without SoftSIC post-processing), for rate 1/2 and 3/4
coded 16-QAM transmission in the high and low diversity
environment, and for both the single-shot and the iterative
detection-decoding case. Points towards the lower left indicate
a better performance-complexity trade-off. For the sake of sim-
plicity, we neglected the complexity of preprocessing (which
depends on the channel coherence time and the burst length)
and decoding. We also normalized the complexity figures to
those of single-shot linear detection.
The presented results illustrate that even in the case of high
rate coding and low diversity, linear MMSE detection achieves
reasonable performance at very low cost – if better perfor-
mance is the target, the detection effort has to be increased
substantially (around a 10-fold increase). For tree search based
detection, it appears to be more attractive to use single-shot
The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06)

detection-decoding with a higher number of retained paths, as R EFERENCES

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High diversity case, 16−QAM
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B. Conclusions
We evaluated the performance of linear MMSE detection for
a number of relevant application scenarios, ranging from a
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The presented results show that for lower channel coding
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cases where high rate channel coding is used and/or transmis-
sion takes place with higher order modulation over a channel
with very low diversity order (substantially below 10).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the German ministry of re-
search and education within the project Wireless Giga-
bit with advanced multimedia support (WIGWAM) under
grant 01 BU 370.
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