On the Optimum Detection of MIMO-SVD Signals With Strong Nonlinear Distortion Effects at the Transmitter

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) architectures are now widely adopted in wireless systems, providing substantial capacity benefits by harnessing spatial diversity and spatial multiplexing. Nonetheless, the large Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) associated with common pre-processing techniques, like Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), increases the system’s susceptibility to nonlinear distortion. Conventional receiver designs that mitigate this distortion often neglect the fact that it has useful information on the transmitted data. Maximum Likelihood (ML) detection offers the capability to take advantage of the nonlinear distortion, but its inherent complexity is prohibitively high. This paper introduces a new MIMO receiver design aimed at exploiting the diversity introduced by the transmitter nonlinearities. It also provides an approximate bound on the achievable ML Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. Our results indicate that the proposed receiver can have a performance close to the ML receiver with just a few iterations.