A tailored-BLAST approach to throughput communications over block-fading MIMO channels

We consider single-terminal communications over slowly fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels from the perspective of throughput. The throughput is defined to be the average rate at which data is reliably transmitted to the receiver allowing for the possibility that some data will be received incorrectly. In delay-sensitive situations the incorrectly decoded data is simply dropped, while in reliability-sensitive situations the receiver notifies the transmitter that certain codewords were incorrectly decoded and these are retransmitted. A new code-layering approach is developed based on our own tailored BLAST that allows us to surpass the performance of a successive-decoding multiple-access approach found in the literature, and with substantially reduced complexity.