An Efficient Detector for STBC-VBLAST Space-Time Code for MIMO Wireless Communications

Hybrid MIMO communication systems are defined as acombination of architectures designed to achieve both multiplexinggain (such as VBLAST), and diversity gain, (suchas STBC) such that transmission schemes that have bothhigh spectral efficiency and link reliability can be developed.In this paper we introduce a new way to representhybrid systems, in which the detection process is carried outin a unified manner for both spatial and diversity transmittedsymbols, using an OSIC algorithm, but symbol by symbol,just as single VBLAST systems performs. In this paperwe present an efficient and low-complexity, ordered, successiveinterference cancellation receiver based on sorted QRdecomposition for the hybrid STBC-VBLAST transmissionscheme. We show how the use of our detection scheme proposaloutperforms other recent hybrid detection schemes interms of bit error rate, even when there is precoding at thetransmitter. We also show our proposal has lower complexity,achieved by exploiting the structure of the linear dispersionmatrices.