Adaptive Threshold-Aided K-Best Sphere Decoding for Large MIMO Systems

This paper proposes an adaptive threshold-aided K-best sphere decoding (AKSD) algorithm for large multiple-input multiple-output systems. In the proposed scheme, to reduce the average number of visited nodes compared to the conventional K-best sphere decoding (KSD), the threshold for retaining the nodes is adaptively determined at each layer of the tree. Specifically, we calculate the adaptive threshold based on the signal-to-noise ratio and index of the layer. The ratio between the first and second smallest accumulated path metrics at each layer is also exploited to determine the threshold value. In each layer, in addition to the K paths associated with the smallest path metrics, we also retain the paths whose path metrics are within the threshold from the Kth smallest path metric. The simulation results show that the proposed AKSD provides nearly the same bit error rate performance as the conventional KSD scheme while achieving a significant reduction in the average number of visited nodes, especially at high signal-to-noise ratios.