High Speed Sphere Decoding Based on Vertically Incremental Computation

Sphere decoding enables maximum likelihood (ML) detection with lower complexity than other decoding algorithms, but it still suffers from large computational delay. This paper proposes a vertical partial Euclidean distance (PED) computation method to reduce the critical path delay and computational resources. Since the proposed method computes ahead the PED of lower levels using upper level symbols, a high speed PED computation unit can be implemented with less hardware resources