Performance of the complex sphere decoder in spatially correlated MIMO channels

The use of multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver is a promising technique for significantly increasing the capacity and spectral efficiency of wireless communication systems. In particular, spatial multiplexing techniques provide a means of increasing the data rate of the system without having to increase the transmitter power or the bandwidth. In recent years, special attention has been paid to the sphere decoder (SD) to detect spatially multiplexed signals. It provides optimal maximum likelihood (ML) performance with reduced complexity, compared to the maximum likelihood detector (MLD). An analysis of the performance of the SD in the presence of spatially correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels is presented. Analytical and simulation results show that, compared to suboptimal linear and nonlinear MIMO detectors, the SD suffers a complexity increase when correlation exists between the antennas at the transmitter or the receiver. In addition, a novel low-complexity channel ordering technique is introduced to reduce the complexity of the SD