The effect of unreliable LLR storage on the performance of MIMO-BICM

Future semiconductor technologies will suffer from reliability issues, which requires a paradigm shift from the assumption of 100% reliable computations to fault-tolerant signal-processing systems. In this paper, we illustrate how the impact of unreliable circuits can be taken into account in the performance analysis of wireless communication systems. To this end, we consider the example of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system using bit-interleaved coded modulation in which a soft-output detector delivers quantized log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) to the channel decoder through an interleaver memory suffering from bit-flips due to reliability issues of the silicon implementation.