A virtual layered space time receiver with maximum likelihood channel detection

This paper proposes a novel receiver architecture named as "Virtual layered space time reception" for MIMO wireless communication systems. In the proposed reception architecture, a transmission signal is regarded to comprise a sign signal and fractional phase shift. The phase shift combined with wireless channels are dealt as a virtual channel. Then, the sign signal which is assumed to be transmitted over the virtual channel is detected by a serial interference canceler (SIC) like V-BLAST. The receiver based on the proposed architecture can detect more data streams than the number of received antennas, even though the architecture applies the SIC. This means that the receiver based on the proposed architecture can form more communications channels between the transmitter and the receiver than the number of received antennas. Therefore, the proposed architecture has potential of increasing channel capacity. Actually, computer simulation result shows that the proposed receiver attains superior performance even when the number of transmit antenna is twice as many as that of the received antennas.