Reduced Complexity Sphere Decoding

In Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems, Sphere Decoding (SD) can achieve performance equivalent to full search Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding with reduced complexity. Several researchers reported techniques that reduce the complexity of SD further. In this paper, a new technique is introduced which decreases the computational complexity of SD substantially, without sacrificing performance. The reduction is accomplished by deconstructing the decoding metric to decrease the number of computations and exploiting the structure of a lattice representation. Simulation results show that this approach achieves substantial gains for the average number of real multiplications and real additions needed to decode one transmitted vector symbol. As an example, for a 4 × 4 MIMO system, the gains in the number of multiplications are 85% with 4-QAM and 90% with 64-QAM, at low SNR.