A low-complexity hybrid algorithm based on particle swarm and ant colony optimization for large-MIMO detection

• A low-complexity hybrid algorithm for large-MIMO detection is proposed.
• Hybridization of ant colony and particle swarm optimization algorithms.
• Superior performance over existing ant colony optimization algorithms.
• The hybrid algorithm achieves near optimal bit error rate performance.

With rapid increase in demand for higher data rates, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems are getting increased research attention because of their high capacity achieving capability. However, the practical implementation of MIMO systems rely on the computational complexity incurred in detection of the transmitted information symbols. The minimum bit error rate performance (BER) can be achieved by using maximum likelihood (ML) search based detection, but it is computationally impractical when number of transmit antennas increases. In this paper, we present a low-complexity hybrid algorithm (HA) to solve the symbol vector detection problem in large-MIMO systems. The proposed algorithm is inspired from the two well known bio-inspired optimization algorithms namely, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, we devise a new probabilistic search approach which combines the distance based search of ants in ACO algorithm and the velocity based search of particles in PSO algorithm. The motivation behind using the hybrid of ACO and PSO is to avoid premature convergence to a local solution and to improve the convergence rate. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the popular minimum mean squared error (MMSE) algorithm and the existing ACO algorithms in terms of BER performance while achieve a near ML performance which makes the algorithm suitable for reliable detection in large-MIMO systems. Furthermore, a faster convergence to achieve a target BER is observed which results in reduction in computational efforts.