On Some Near Optimal Low Complexity Detectors for MIMO Fading Channels

We introduce several low complexity sub-optimal MIMO detection schemes based on the List-BLAST algorithm, which exhausts the constellation points in the first layer of a BLAST scheme to generate multiple candidate solutions from which the maximum likelihood solution is determined. The candidates can also be used as initial points for the space alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm to further improve performance. The proposed schemes can achieve close to optimal performance for both hard and soft output detection with lower complexity than that of the sphere detection in our simulation settings