A near maximum likelihood decoding algorithm for MIMO systems based on semi-definite programming

In multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding is equivalent to finding the closest lattice point in an N-dimensional complex space. In general, this problem is known to be NP hard. In this paper, we propose a quasi-maximum likelihood algorithm based on semi-definite programming (SDP). We introduce several SDP relaxation models for MIMO systems, with increasing complexity. We use interior-point methods for solving the models and obtain a near-ML performance with polynomial computational complexity. Lattice basis reduction is applied to further reduce the computational complexity of solving these models