An Efficient Scheduling Architecture for QR Decomposition Using Fixed-Point Arithmetic for Detection of STBC-VBLAST Codes

In this work we propose a low complexity detector for hybrid MIMO space-time codes based on linear dispersion coding. This detector is designed for systems with fewer receiver than transmitter antennas. We also present a fast, scalable hardware architecture (suitable for FPGA implementation) that performs the matrix inversion required by the detector. This architecture is based on the QR matrix decomposition, implemented with a low-complexity, parallel and pipelined CORDIC with fixed-point arithmetic. This results in a 60% reduction in complexity, compared with other reported algorithms. We show that the proposed detector achieves better bit-error rates than comparable double-space-time transmit diversity (DSTTD) fixed-point detectors.