An Adaptive Conditional Zero-Forcing Decoder with Full-diversity, Least Complexity and Essentially-ML Performance for STBCs

A low complexity, essentially-ML decoding technique for the Golden code and the 3 antenna Perfect code was introduced by Sirianunpiboon, Howard and Calderbank. Though no theoretical analysis of the decoder was given, the simulations showed that this decoding technique has almost maximum-likelihood (ML) performance. Inspired by this technique, in this paper we introduce two new low complexity decoders for Space-Time Block Codes (STBCs) - the Adaptive Conditional Zero-Forcing (ACZF) decoder and the ACZF decoder with successive interference cancellation (ACZF-SIC), which include as a special case the decoding technique of Sirianunpiboon et al. We show that both ACZF and ACZF-SIC decoders are capable of achieving full-diversity, and we give sufficient conditions for an STBC to give full-diversity with these decoders. We then show that the Golden code, the 3 and 4 antenna Perfect codes, the 3 antenna Threaded Algebraic Space-Time code and the 4 antenna rate 2 code of Srinath and Rajan are all full-diversity ACZF/ACZF-SIC decodable with complexity strictly less than that of their ML decoders. Simulations show that the proposed decoding method performs identical to ML decoding for all these five codes. These STBCs along with the proposed decoding algorithm outperform all known codes in terms of decoding complexity and error performance for 2,3 and 4 transmit antennas. We further provide a lower bound on the complexity of full-diversity ACZF/ACZF-SIC decoding. All the five codes listed above achieve this lower bound and hence are optimal in terms of minimizing the ACZF/ACZF-SIC decoding complexity. Both ACZF and ACZF-SIC decoders are amenable to sphere decoding implementation.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Corrected a minor typographical erro

High-Rate Space-Time Coded Large MIMO Systems: Low-Complexity Detection and Channel Estimation

In this paper, we present a low-complexity algorithm for detection in high-rate, non-orthogonal space-time block coded (STBC) large-MIMO systems that achieve high spectral efficiencies of the order of tens of bps/Hz. We also present a training-based iterative detection/channel estimation scheme for such large STBC MIMO systems. Our simulation results show that excellent bit error rate and nearness-to-capacity performance are achieved by the proposed multistage likelihood ascent search (M-LAS) detector in conjunction with the proposed iterative detection/channel estimation scheme at low complexities. The fact that we could show such good results for large STBCs like 16x16 and 32x32 STBCs from Cyclic Division Algebras (CDA) operating at spectral efficiencies in excess of 20 bps/Hz (even after accounting for the overheads meant for pilot based training for channel estimation and turbo coding) establishes the effectiveness of the proposed detector and channel estimator. We decode perfect codes of large dimensions using the proposed detector. With the feasibility of such a low-complexity detection/channel estimation scheme, large-MIMO systems with tens of antennas operating at several tens of bps/Hz spectral efficiencies can become practical, enabling interesting high data rate wireless applications.Comment: v3: Performance/complexity comparison of the proposed scheme with other large-MIMO architectures/detectors has been added (Sec. IV-D). The paper has been accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP): Spl. Iss. on Managing Complexity in Multiuser MIMO Systems. v2: Section V on Channel Estimation is update

Multiple Beamforming with Perfect Coding

Perfect Space-Time Block Codes (PSTBCs) achieve full diversity, full rate, nonvanishing constant minimum determinant, uniform average transmitted energy per antenna, and good shaping. However, the high decoding complexity is a critical issue for practice. When the Channel State Information (CSI) is available at both the transmitter and the receiver, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is commonly applied for a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system to enhance the throughput or the performance. In this paper, two novel techniques, Perfect Coded Multiple Beamforming (PCMB) and Bit-Interleaved Coded Multiple Beamforming with Perfect Coding (BICMB-PC), are proposed, employing both PSTBCs and SVD with and without channel coding, respectively. With CSI at the transmitter (CSIT), the decoding complexity of PCMB is substantially reduced compared to a MIMO system employing PSTBC, providing a new prospect of CSIT. Especially, because of the special property of the generation matrices, PCMB provides much lower decoding complexity than the state-of-the-art SVD-based uncoded technique in dimensions 2 and 4. Similarly, the decoding complexity of BICMB-PC is much lower than the state-of-the-art SVD-based coded technique in these two dimensions, and the complexity gain is greater than the uncoded case. Moreover, these aforementioned complexity reductions are achieved with only negligible or modest loss in performance.Comment: accepted to journa

Successive interference cancellation schemes for time-reversal space-time block codes

In this paper, we propose two simple signal detectors that are based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) for time-reversal space-time block codes to combat intersymbol interference in frequency-selective fading environments. The main idea is to treat undetected symbols and noise together as Gaussian noise with matching mean and variance and use the already-detected symbols to help current signal recovery. The first scheme is a simple SIC signal detector whose ordering is based on the channel powers. The second proposed SIC scheme, which is denoted parallel arbitrated SIC (PA-SIC), is a structure that concatenates in parallel a certain number of SIC detectors with different ordering sequences and then combines the soft output of each individual SIC to achieve performance gains. For the proposed PA-SIC, we describe the optimal ordering algorithm as a combinatorial problem and present a low-complexity ordering technique for signal decoding. Simulations show that the new schemes can provide a performance that is very close to maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) decoding under time-invariant conditions. Results for frequency-selective and doubly selective fading channels show that the proposed schemes significantly outperform the conventional minimum mean square error-(MMSE) like receiver and that the new PA-SIC performs much better than the proposed conventional SIC and is not far in performance from the MLSE. The computational complexity of the SIC algorithms is only linear with the number of transmit antennas and transmission rates, which is very close to the MMSE and much lower than the MLSE. The PA-SIC also has a complexity that is linear with the number of SIC components that are in parallel, and the optimum tradeoff between performance and complexity can be easily determined according to the number of SIC detectors

On the Complexity of Exact Maximum-Likelihood Decoding for Asymptotically Good Low Density Parity Check Codes: A New Perspective

The problem of exact maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding of general linear codes is well-known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we show that exact ML decoding of a class of asymptotically good low density parity check codes — expander codes — over binary symmetric channels (BSCs) is possible with an average-case polynomial complexity. This offers a new way of looking at the complexity issue of exact ML decoding for communication systems where the randomness in channel plays a fundamental central role. More precisely, for any bit-flipping probability p in a nontrivial range, there exists a rate region of non-zero support and a family of asymptotically good codes which achieve error probability exponentially decaying in coding length n while admitting exact ML decoding in average-case polynomial time. As p approaches zero, this rate region approaches the Shannon channel capacity region. Similar results can be extended to AWGN channels, suggesting it may be feasible to eliminate the error floor phenomenon associated with belief-propagation decoding of LDPC codes in the high SNR regime. The derivations are based on a hierarchy of ML certificate decoding algorithms adaptive to the channel realization. In this process, we propose an efficient O(n^2) new ML certificate algorithm based on the max-flow algorithm. Moreover, exact ML decoding of the considered class of codes constructed from LDPC codes with regular left degree, of which the considered expander codes are a special case, remains NP-hard; thus giving an interesting contrast between the worst-case and average-case complexities

High-rate codes that are linear in space and time

Multiple-antenna systems that operate at high rates require simple yet effective space-time transmission schemes to handle the large traffic volume in real time. At rates of tens of bits per second per hertz, Vertical Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST), where every antenna transmits its own independent substream of data, has been shown to have good performance and simple encoding and decoding. Yet V-BLAST suffers from its inability to work with fewer receive antennas than transmit antennas-this deficiency is especially important for modern cellular systems, where a base station typically has more antennas than the mobile handsets. Furthermore, because V-BLAST transmits independent data streams on its antennas there is no built-in spatial coding to guard against deep fades from any given transmit antenna. On the other hand, there are many previously proposed space-time codes that have good fading resistance and simple decoding, but these codes generally have poor performance at high data rates or with many antennas. We propose a high-rate coding scheme that can handle any configuration of transmit and receive antennas and that subsumes both V-BLAST and many proposed space-time block codes as special cases. The scheme transmits substreams of data in linear combinations over space and time. The codes are designed to optimize the mutual information between the transmitted and received signals. Because of their linear structure, the codes retain the decoding simplicity of V-BLAST, and because of their information-theoretic optimality, they possess many coding advantages. We give examples of the codes and show that their performance is generally superior to earlier proposed methods over a wide range of rates and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)