Bound-intersection detection for multiple-symbol differential unitary space-time modulation

This paper considers multiple-symbol differential detection (MSD) of differential unitary space-time modulation (DUSTM) over multiple-antenna systems. We derive a novel exact maximum-likelihood (ML) detector, called the bound-intersection detector (BID), using the extended Euclidean algorithm for single-symbol detection of diagonal constellations. While the ML search complexity is exponential in the number of transmit antennas and the data rate, our algorithm, particularly in high signal-to-noise ratio, achieves significant computational savings over the naive ML algorithm and the previous detector based on lattice reduction. We also develop four BID variants for MSD. The first two are ML and use branch-and-bound, the third one is suboptimal, which first uses BID to generate a candidate subset and then exhaustively searches over the reduced space, and the last one generalizes decision-feedback differential detection. Simulation results show that the BID and its MSD variants perform nearly ML, but do so with significantly reduced complexity.