A new class of soft MIMO demodulation algorithms

We propose a new class of soft-input soft-output demodulation schemes for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, based on the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework under both stochastic and deterministic settings. The stochastic SMC sampler generates MIMO symbol samples based on importance sampling and resampling techniques, whereas the deterministic SMC approach recursively performs exploration and selection steps in a greedy manner. By exploiting the artificial sequential structure of the existing simple Bell-Labs layered space-time (BLAST) detection method based on ing and cancellation, the proposed algorithms achieve an error probability performance that is orders of magnitude better than the traditional BLAST detection schemes while maintaining a low computational complexity. In fact, the new methods offer performance comparable with that of the sphere decoding algorithm without attendant increase in complexity. More importantly, being soft-input soft-output in nature, both the stochastic and deterministic SMC detectors can be employed as the first-stage demodulator in a turbo receiver in coded MIMO systems. Such a turbo receiver successively improves the receiver performance by iteratively exchanging the so-called extrinsic information between the soft outer channel decoder and the inner soft MIMO demodulator under both known channel state and unknown channel state scenarios. Computer simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms.