Efficient probabilistic sphere decoding architecture

An efficient probabilistic sphere decoding (SD) architecture, which applies a probabilistic search algorithm to the depth-first SD architecture, is proposed for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed architecture evaluates the more promising candidates earlier in the search while retaining hardware efficiency of the depth-first SD architecture by adding special hardware blocks. The architecture either improves the error performance or increases the throughput of the state-of-the-art depth-first SD architecture significantly