A virtual channel detector for iterative receiver in overloaded MIMO OFDM systems

Iterative MIMO receivers with virtual channel are known to outperform linear detectors in overloaded multiple-input multiple-output systems with orthogonal-frequency division multiplex (MIMO-OFDM). This paper proposes a novel virtual channel detector that enables iterative MIMO receivers to achieve superior performance to the conventional receivers. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel signal estimation technique named as “extended maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation” to select more reliable virtual channel. The proposed technique estimates the virtual channel with not only the a priori information on the virtual channels but also that on the real signals. The performance of the proposed detector with the extended MAP estimation is verified in a 6 × 2 MIMO OFDM system where the Turbo code is applied. The receiver with the proposed detector achieves much better performance than the conventional receivers. Actually, the proposed detector enables the MIMO receiver to achieve a gain of 3.0 dB at the BER of 10^-5, compared with conventional receivers with virtual channels, e.g., the soft input soft output (SISO) MAP detector with the same Turbo decoder. It is confirmed that the proposed receiver has by about one-fifth less complexity than the receiver with the SISO MAP MIMO detector.