A low complexity branch-and-bound-based decoder for V-BLAST systems with PSK signals

In this paper, a fast sphere decoder is proposed for the joint detection of phase-shift keying (PSK) signals in uncoded Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space Time (V-BLAST) systems. The proposed decoder consists of preprocessing stage and search stage. The preprocessing stage is based on the enhancement of the ordering mean square error decision feedback equalizer (MMSE-DFE). Its role is to generate a tree structure suitable for the search stage. The search stage relies on the depth-first brand-and-bound (BB) algorithm with “best-first” orders stored in lookup tables. Simulation results show that the proposed decoder is able to provide the system with the maximum likelihood (ML) performance at low complexity.