Partial decision ordered successive interference cancellation detection algorithm for VBLAST

The use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver results in enormous capacity increase. As a space-time architecture, VBLAST (vertical Bell laboratories layered space time) has demonstrated very high spectral efficiency. Originally, the BLAST detection scheme, called OSIC (ordered successive interference cancellation), was based on a successive interference cancellation. OSIC suffers from the error propagation problem. In this paper, we present a modified detection algorithm, called PD_OSIC (partial decision OSIC), which aims at improving the performance of OSIC. It increases the number of candidate symbols, remains all candidate symbols and uses ML detection to detect all substreams at last stage. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm obtains far better performance than OSIC.