Reduced Complexity MMSE-SIC Detector in V-BLAST Systems

Theoretical and experimental studies have shown that layered space-time architectures like the Vertical Bell labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) system can exploit the capacity advantage of multiple antenna systems in rich-scattering environments. In this paper, we present a reduced complexity algorithm for detecting such architecture with respect to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. This algorithm bases on the conventional successive interference cancellation (SIC) detection algorithm, but selects several layers with sufficiently large signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINRs) instead of the layer with largest SINR at each stage of successive cancellation, and utilizes the Gram-Schmitt orthogonalization (GSO) to substitute the computation of pseudo-inverse in finding the weight vectors. Therefore the computational complexity of the proposed detection algorithm is significantly reduced but the performance degradation is little.