Depth-first branch-and-bound-based decoder with low complexity

In this paper, a fast sphere decoder is proposed for the joint detection of phase-shift keying (PSK) signals in uncoded Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space Time (V-BLAST) systems. The proposed decoder, PSD, consists of preprocessing stage and search stage. The search stage of PSD relies on the depth-first branch-and-bound (BB) algorithm with "best-first" orders stored in lookup tables. Simulation results show that the PSD is able to provide the system with the maximum likelihood (ML) performance at low complexity.