An improved LR-aided K-best algorithm for MIMO detection

Recently, lattice reduction (LR) technique has caught great attention for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) receiver because of its low complexity and high performance. However, when the number of antennas is large, LR-aided linear detectors and successive interference cancellation (SIC) detectors still exhibit considerable performance gap to the optimal maximum likelihood detector (MLD). To enhance the performance of the LR-aided detectors, the LR-aided K-best algorithm was developed at the cost of the extra complexity on the order O(N
²
_t
K + N
_t
K
²
), where N
_t
is the number of transmit antennas and K is the number of candidates. In this paper, we develop an LR-aided K-best algorithm with lower complexity by exploiting a priority queue. With the aid of the priority queue, our analysis shows that the complexity of the LR-aided K-best algorithm can be further reduced to O(N
²
_t
K + N
_t
Klog
₂
(K)). The low complexity of the proposed LR-aided K-best algorithm allows us to perform the algorithm for large MIMO systems (e.g., 50×50 MIMO systems) with large candidate sizes. Simulations show that as the number of antennas increases, the error performance approaches that of AWGN channel.