Complexity reduction in joint decoding of block coded signals in overloaded MIMO-OFDM system

This paper presents a low complexity joint decoding scheme of block coded signals in an overloaded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In previous literature, a joint maximum likelihood decoding scheme of block coded signals has been evaluated through theoretical analysis. The diversity gain with block coding prevents performance degradation induced by signal multiplexing. However, the computational complexity of the joint decoding scheme increases exponentially with the number of multiplexed signal streams. Thus, this paper proposes a two step joint decoding scheme for the block coded signals. The first step of the proposed scheme calculates metrics to reduce the number of the candidate codewords using decoding based on joint maximum likehood symbol detection. The second step of the proposed scheme carries out joint decoding on the reduced candidate codewords. It is shown that the proposed scheme reduces the complexity by about 1/174 for 4 signal stream transmission.