Partial Tree Search Assisted Symbol Detection for Massive MIMO Systems

In the era of the fifth generation (5G) communication networks, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems demand even lower computation complexity and power consumption while catching up with good detection performance. In this paper, a low-complexity nonlinear detection algorithm is proposed for massive MIMO systems, which is based on partial tree search and successive interference cancellation (SIC). The proposed scheme allows us to expedite the detection process by coping with the transmit symbols group by group. As compared to vertical-Bell laboratories layered space time (V-BLAST), the major breakthrough of computation reduction lies in the fact that the partial tree search can assist the detection process to avoid the inversion of the detection matrix required in each recursion of the SIC process. Both computational complexity analysis and simulation results show that our proposed algorithm not only significantly reduces computational complexity, but also has better bit error rate (BER) performance.