Belief Propagation over SISO/MIMO Frequency Selective Fading Channels

In this letter, we propose an iterative belief propagation (BP) channel detector (equalizer) over single-input single- output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) frequency selective fading channels as an alternative to the typically used maximum a-posteriori (MAP) or maximum likelihood (ML) detectors. The proposed detector has a parallel structure, resulting in fast hardware implementations. Moreover, BP detector is less complex than the MAP detector and it has a short decoding delay. We analyze the bit error rate and the mutual information and show that, over frequency selective fading channels, the proposed BP detector achieves a near-optimal performance, even in the presence of the length 4 cycles in the corresponding channel factor graph.