Low-effort near maximum likelihood MIMO detection with optimum hardware resource exploitation

A new approach is proposed 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) equaliser 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 that is extremely advantageous for the hardware implementation of the detector.