Ordered H-BLAST for MIMO/OFDM systems over multipath channels

Abstract

This paper addresses an OFDM/MIMO coded system where multiple data sub-streams are encoded separately and transmitted in parallel. If successive interference cancellation (SIC) across sub-streams is to be used at the receiver, to minimize error propagation (EP), it is recommended to decode a full sub-stream before cancellation to utilize the powerfulness of channel coding. For the same reason, it is also recommended to process the different sub-streams in an order that matches their reception quality. While this is always possible in flat fading channels, it is not straightforward in multipath channels where different modulation symbols have different channel qualities due to frequency selectivity. This paper addresses this problem and introduces an ordering scheme for coded systems that significantly improves system performance.