A Computationally Efficient Sphere Decoding Algorithm with Smart Radius Reduction Control

We propose a computationally efficient sphere decoding (SD) algorithm with smart radius reduction control (SRRC). As a baseline algorithm for SD, we consider the modified Schnorr-Euchner (SE) algorithm [1] (hereafter, called as the MSE algorithm). In principle, the radius after zero-forcing decision feedback equalization (ZF-DFE) estimation can be reduced further if we select a new lattice vector closer to the received signal vector than the lattice vector corresponding to the ZF-DFE estimate does. In our case, we obtain such a better lattice vector by performing a sequence of alternating one-dimensional searches, starting from the ZF-DFE estimate. We then develop a novel SRRC algorithm that adopts adaptively the additional radius reduction process according to the estimated signal-to-noise-power ratio (SNR) after ZF-DFE estimation. In addition, we analyze the effect of detection ordering on the complexity for SD. Column-norm ordering of the channel matrix and optimal ordering [1] are considered here. From our analyses, we see that SRRC can reduce greatly the complexity for SD and the degree of complexity reduction gets significant as the SNR decreases, irrespective of detection ordering schemes used