Comparison of the software defined radio implementations of the K-best list sphere detection

This paper introduces four programmable processor platforms and a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver based on the K-best list sphere detection algorithm. The four platforms can be considered as current state-of-the-art software defined radio (SDR) devices for wireless communication. The platforms can be categorized as a digital signal processor (DSP), SDR processor, application-specific processor (ASP) and application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP). The DSP is a popular very long instruction word (VLIW) device (TMS320C6455), the SDR processor employs multi-threading and multiple cores (SB3500 core processor), the ASP is based on transport triggered architecture (TTA), while the ASIP is the SDR processor enhanced with a special instruction-set extension for sorting.