Semidefinite Relaxations for MIMO Transmissions With High-Order QAM Constellations

In this letter, simple semidefinite relaxations are proposed for the detection of high-order quadrature amplitude modulations in multiple-input–multiple-output systems. The detector is based on the addition of several convex and concave quadratic inequality constraints into the maximum-likelihood detector before relaxing the problem into a convex one. Combined with a randomized sampling procedure, it is shown that the performance and worst-case computational complexity of the proposed approach makes it very competitive against existing detectors in large problem sizes.