A new improved detector for the V-BLAST system

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method for symbol detection in the Vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) system. The performance of V-BLAST is limited by the worst subchannel, i.e. the first iteration, the diversity order of which is N/sub r/ - N/sub t/ + 1 where N/sub t/ and N/sub r/ are the number of transmit and receive antennas. A diversity order of N/sub r/ - N/sub t/ + 1 + T is achievable by delaying decisions by T stages. Considering the statistical properties of the error patterns, we present a new algorithm to delay the decisions to achieve higher diversity orders with reduced computational complexity. The performance-complexity measure of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of the V-BLAST detector and sphere decoder.