Low Effort Near Maximum Likelihood MIMO Detection with Optimum Hardware Resource Exploitation

We propose a new approach to reach a near maximum likelihood (ML) MIMO detection performance with a strongly reduced computational effort. This method is based on a two-stage detection. In the first detection step a Zero-Forcing (ZF) equalizer is applied followed by a subsequent decision unit. The second step is a reduced-search (RS) algorithm over the ZF solution, which will be performed in an efficient way at the different transmitted data streams. The method provides a near ML performance while it demands a fixed computational effort which is extremely advantageous for the Hardware implementation of the detector.