SLIC: A Low Complexity Demodulator for MIMO

This paper describes a low complexity demodulator for MIMO, which approximates the optimal joint detector. Our demodulator is called SLIC, which stands for serial localization with indecision and color suppression. The main features of SLIC are: 1) a serial structure, where the search for the eventual solution is incrementally localized in each stage; 2) each stage uses a sparse set of centroids as a proxy for constellation symbols; 3) centroids represent subsets of constellation symbols, and the subsets overlap by design. The use of centroids creates an intentional residual signal, which is left to a later stage to resolve, and is suppressed as a colored noise in the current stage. We present performance results with different subset designs for 16, 64 and 256QAM. Overall, we show that SLIC is an attractive tradeoff of complexity and performance in the MIMO scenario.