A Framework for Fixed Complexity Breadth-First MIMO Detection

In this work we present a unifying framework to characterize different types of breadth-first tree search detectors for multiple antenna systems. All considered algorithms operate at fixed complexity and require only a single pass through the detection tree, making them very attractive for practical implementation. Existing approaches are placed into this framework and a performance-complexity analysis is performed for both hard-output and soft-output detection. The B-Chase and the parallel smart candidate adding algorithm emerge as the most attractive schemes for hard-output and soft-output detection, respectively.