An averaged-LLR Group Detection for higher order MIMO MLD

Designing an efficient MIMO decoder for higher order MIMO system such as 8×8 is a big challenge. MLD is well-known as the optimal solution in terms of detection performance. However, the complexity of the MLD increases exponentially with the number of constellation points and the number of spatial streams. The Group Detection (GD) method has been considered as a good choice because it balances well the trade-off between detection accuracy and computational complexity. This method converts the higher order MIMO channel matrix into several lower order matrices and then decodes these lower order matrices separately. To improve the GD detection accuracy, a Group Selection (GS) method should be used before doing GD. While the Optimal GS (OGS) method achieves high performance, its complexity is too high for real applications. In this paper, we propose an Averaged Log Likelihood Ratio Group Detection (A-LLR-GD) for balancing the complexity-performance trade-off. The packet error rate (PER) and Bit Error Rate (BER) simulation results on IEEE 802.11ac simulator show that our proposed one achieves higher performance than the conventional works.