On Low-Complexity Full-diversity Detection In Multi-User MIMO Multiple-Access Channels

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques are becoming commonplace in recent wireless communication standards. This newly introduced dimension (i.e., space) can be efficiently used to mitigate the interference in the multi-user MIMO context. In this paper, we focus on the uplink of a MIMO multiple access channel (MAC) where perfect channel state information (CSI) is only available at the destination. We provide new sufficient conditions for a wide range of space-time block codes (STBC)s to achieve full-diversity under partial interference cancellation group decoding (PICGD) with or without successive interference cancellation (SIC) for completely blind users. Interference cancellation (IC) schemes for two and three users are then provided and shown to satisfy the full-diversity criteria. Beside the complexity reduction due to the fact that PICGD enables separate decoding of distinct users without sacrificing the diversity gain, further reduction of the decoding complexity may be obtained. In fact, thanks to the structure of the proposed schemes, the real and imaginary parts of each user’s symbols may be decoupled without any loss of performance. Our new IC scheme is shown to outperform recently proposed two-user IC scheme especially for high spectral efficiency while requiring significantly less decoding complexity.