FPGA-based Tabu search for detection in large-scale MIMO systems

The increasing scale of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) topologies employed in forthcoming wireless communications standards presents a substantial implementation challenge to designers of embedded baseband signal processing architectures for MIMO transceivers. Specifically the increased scale of such systems has a substantial impact on the performance/cost balance of detection algorithms for these systems. Whilst in small-scale systems Sphere Decoding (SD) algorithms offer the best quasi-ML performance/cost balance, in larger systems heuristic detectors, such Tabu-Search (TS) detectors are superior. This paper addresses a dearth of research in architectures for TS-based MIMO detection, presenting the first known realisations of TS detectors for 4 × 4 and 10 × 10 MIMO systems. To the best of the authors´ knowledge, these are the largest single-chip detectors on record.