A virtual layered space-frequency receiver architecture with iterative decoding

In this paper, a novel receiver architecture is proposed for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems; the proposed architecture helps achieve superior performance in multipath fading channels when the number of layered streams exceeds the number of receiving antennas. In this architecture, the concept of "virtual channel" is adopted to attain diversity gain even when successive detection is applied for reducing computational complexity, while orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is employed to combat multipath fading. Actually, successive detection is carried out in all possible virtual channels, and the virtual channel with the minimum error probability is detected with the assistance of the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) decoder in the architecture. In addition, soft input and soft output (SISO) iterative detection is introduced in the virtual channel estimation scheme. The performance of the proposed architecture is verified by computer simulations. This architecture can be implemented with lesser complexity than that in maximum likelihood detection (MLD), but the gain in the former case exceeds that in the latter by 4.5 dB at the BER of 10^-3for 4 × 2 MIMO-OFDM.