Layered Orthogonal Lattice Detector for Two Transmit Antenna Communications

A novel detector for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications is presented. The algorithm belongs to the class of the lattice detectors, i.e. it finds a reduced complexity solution to the problem of finding the closest vector to the received observations. The algorithm achieves optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) performance in case of two transmit antennas, at the same time keeping a complexity much lower than the exhaustive search-based ML detection technique. Also, differently from the state-of-art lattice detector (namely sphere decoder), the proposed algorithm is suitable for a highly parallel hardware architecture and for a reliable bit soft-output information generation, thus making it a promising option for real-time high-data rate transmission.