Weighted Viterbi decoding for MIMO-OFDM systems with linear precoding

In this paper, a weighted Viterbi decoding by using the eigenvalues of the channel matrix is proposed to improve error rate performance for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with linear precoding. The optimal transmitter precoding matrix is obtained from the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix. The proposed method exploit the features of precoding based on the SVD, in which the eigenvalues are defined as data reliability metric and we incorporate this information in the soft decision Viterbi decoding. Simulation results confirm that this technique improves error rate performance significantly