Efficient symbol detection in Multi-Device STBC-MIMO System

In this paper, we present an iterative algorithm for detecting symbols at the receiver side in a multi-device (MD) STBC-MIMO System. We find that this algorithm has good performance especially at a low SNR region in rank-deficient MIMO systems. A multi-device system is a good example of a rank deficient system because the total number of transmit antennas are greater than the number of receive antennas. The detection problem is known to be NP-Hard. Exhaustive search for finding an optimal detection (maximum likelihood (ML) detection) has a computational complexity that increases exponentially with the number of mobile devices, transmit antennas per mobile device, and the number of bits per symbols. We apply estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) to detecting symbols in a rank-deficient MD-STBC-MIMO system. The proposed EDA detector finds a nearly optimal solution in real time and also requires very low amount of computation as compared to the ML (exhaustive search) and sphere decoder (SD). The effectiveness of EDA is verified through simulation results.