A New Modified Viterbo-Boutros Sphere Decoding Algorithm

In this paper, a new sphere decoding algorithm is introduced which is a modification of the Viterbo-Boutros (VB) algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, the problem of the initial selection of the search sphere radius in the VB algorithm has been removed, and furthermore, the speed of the algorithm is increased. To examine the performance of the proposed algorithm, we employ it in detection of signals in code division multiple access (CDMA) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Computer simulations, by using the proposed algorithm, show a significant performance improvement with respect to other suboptimal detection methods.