Efficient Lattice Decoders for the Linear Gaussian Vector Channel: Performance & Complexity Analysis

The theory of lattices --- a mathematical approach for representing infinite discrete points in Euclidean space, has become a powerful tool to analyze many point-to-point digital and wireless communication systems, particularly, communication systems that can be well-described by the linear Gaussian vector channel model. This is mainly due to the three facts about channel codes constructed using lattices: they have simple structure, their ability to achieve the fundamental limits (the capacity) of the channel, and most importantly, they can be decoded using efficient decoders called lattice decoders. Since its introduction to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems, sphere decoders has become an attractive efficient implementation of lattice decoders, especially for small signal dimensions and/or moderate to large signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In the first part of this dissertation, we consider sphere decoding algorithms that describe lattice decoding. The exact complexity analysis of the basic sphere decoder for general space-time codes applied to MIMO wireless channel is known to be difficult. Characterizing and understanding the complexity distribution is important, especially when the sphere decoder is used under practically relevant runtime constraints. In this work, we shed the light on the (average) computational complexity of sphere decoding for the quasi-static, LAttice Space-Time (LAST) coded MIMO channel. Sphere decoders are only efficient in the high SNR regime and low signal dimensions, and exhibits exponential (average) complexity for low-to-moderate SNR and large signal dimensions. On the other extreme, linear and non-linear receivers such as minimum mean-square error (MMSE), and MMSE decision-feedback equalization (DFE) are considered attractive alternatives to sphere decoders in MIMO channels. Unfortunately, the very low decoding complexity advantage that these decoders can provide comes at the expense of poor performance, especially for large signal dimensions. The problem of designing low complexity receivers for the MIMO channel that achieve near-optimal performance is considered a challenging problem and has driven much research in the past years. The problem can solved through the use of lattice sequential decoding that is capable of bridging the gap between sphere decoders and low complexity linear decoders (e.g., MMSE-DFE decoder). In the second part of this thesis, the asymptotic performance of the lattice sequential decoder for LAST coded MIMO channel is analyzed. We determine the rates achievable by lattice coding and sequential decoding applied to such a channel. The diversity-multiplexing tradeoff under such a decoder is derived as a function of its parameter--- the bias term. In this work, we analyze both the computational complexity distribution and the average complexity of such a decoder in the high SNR regime. We show that there exists a cut-off multiplexing gain for which the average computational complexity of the decoder remains bounded. Our analysis reveals that there exists a finite probability that the number of computations performed by the decoder may become excessive, even at high SNR, during high channel noise. This probability is usually referred to as the probability of a decoding failure. Such probability limits the performance of the lattice sequential decoder, especially for a one-way communication system. For a two-way communication system, such as in MIMO Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) system, the feedback channel can be used to eliminate the decoding failure probability. In this work, we modify the lattice sequential decoder for the MIMO ARQ channel, to predict in advance the occurrence of decoding failure to avoid wasting the time trying to decode the message. This would result in a huge saving in decoding complexity. In particular, we will study the throughput-performance-complexity tradeoffs in sequential decoding algorithms and the effect of preprocessing and termination strategies. We show, analytically and via simulation, that using the lattice sequential decoder that implements a simple yet efficient time-out algorithm for joint error detection and correction, the optimal tradeoff of the MIMO ARQ channel can be achieved with significant reduction in decoding complexity

Iterative decoding for MIMO channels via modified sphere decoding

In recent years, soft iterative decoding techniques have been shown to greatly improve the bit error rate performance of various communication systems. For multiantenna systems employing space-time codes, however, it is not clear what is the best way to obtain the soft information required of the iterative scheme with low complexity. In this paper, we propose a modification of the Fincke-Pohst (sphere decoding) algorithm to estimate the maximum a posteriori probability of the received symbol sequence. The new algorithm solves a nonlinear integer least squares problem and, over a wide range of rates and signal-to-noise ratios, has polynomial-time complexity. Performance of the algorithm, combined with convolutional, turbo, and low-density parity check codes, is demonstrated on several multiantenna channels. The results for systems that employ space-time modulation schemes seem to indicate that the best performing schemes are those that support the highest mutual information between the transmitted and received signals, rather than the best diversity gain

Reduced Complexity Sphere Decoding

In Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems, Sphere Decoding (SD) can achieve performance equivalent to full search Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding, with reduced complexity. Several researchers reported techniques that reduce the complexity of SD further. In this paper, a new technique is introduced which decreases the computational complexity of SD substantially, without sacrificing performance. The reduction is accomplished by deconstructing the decoding metric to decrease the number of computations and exploiting the structure of a lattice representation. Furthermore, an application of SD, employing a proposed smart implementation with very low computational complexity is introduced. This application calculates the soft bit metrics of a bit-interleaved convolutional-coded MIMO system in an efficient manner. Based on the reduced complexity SD, the proposed smart implementation employs the initial radius acquired by Zero-Forcing Decision Feedback Equalization (ZF-DFE) which ensures no empty spheres. Other than that, a technique of a particular data structure is also incorporated to efficiently reduce the number of executions carried out by SD. Simulation results show that these approaches achieve substantial gains in terms of the computational complexity for both uncoded and coded MIMO systems.Comment: accepted to Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1009.351

Decoding by Sampling: A Randomized Lattice Algorithm for Bounded Distance Decoding

Despite its reduced complexity, lattice reduction-aided decoding exhibits a widening gap to maximum-likelihood (ML) performance as the dimension increases. To improve its performance, this paper presents randomized lattice decoding based on Klein's sampling technique, which is a randomized version of Babai's nearest plane algorithm (i.e., successive interference cancelation (SIC)). To find the closest lattice point, Klein's algorithm is used to sample some lattice points and the closest among those samples is chosen. Lattice reduction increases the probability of finding the closest lattice point, and only needs to be run once during pre-processing. Further, the sampling can operate very efficiently in parallel. The technical contribution of this paper is two-fold: we analyze and optimize the decoding radius of sampling decoding resulting in better error performance than Klein's original algorithm, and propose a very efficient implementation of random rounding. Of particular interest is that a fixed gain in the decoding radius compared to Babai's decoding can be achieved at polynomial complexity. The proposed decoder is useful for moderate dimensions where sphere decoding becomes computationally intensive, while lattice reduction-aided decoding starts to suffer considerable loss. Simulation results demonstrate near-ML performance is achieved by a moderate number of samples, even if the dimension is as high as 32

Channel coded iterative center-shifting K-best sphere detection for rank-deficient systems

Based on an EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart assisted receiver design, a low-complexity near-Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) detector is constructed for high-throughput MIMO systems. A high throughput is achieved by invoking high-order modulation schemes and/or multiple transmit antennas, while employing a novel sphere detector (SD) termed as a center-shifting SD scheme, which updates the SD’s search center during its consecutive iterations with the aid of channel decoder. Two low-complexity iterative center-shifting SD aided receiver architectures are investigated, namely the direct-hard-decision centershifting (DHDC) and the direct-soft-decision center-shifting (DSDC) schemes. Both of them are capable of attaining a considerable memory and complexity reduction over the conventional SD-aided iterative benchmark receiver. For example, the DSDC scheme reduces the candidate-list-generation-related and extrinsic-LLR-calculation related complexity by a factor of 3.5 and 16, respectively. As a further benefit, the associated memory requirements were also reduced by a factor of 16