MIMO Sphere Decoding With Successive Interference Cancellation for Two-Dimensional Non-Uniform Constellations

Non-uniform constellations (NUCs) have been introduced to improve the performance of quadrature amplitude modulation constellations. 1D-NUCs keep the squared shape, while 2D-NUCs break that constraint to provide robustness. An impending problem with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is the optimum demapping complexity, which grows exponentially with the number of antennas and the constellation order. Some well-known sub-optimum MIMO demappers, such as soft fixed-complexity sphere decoders (SFSD), can reduce that complexity. However, SFSD demappers do not work with the 2D-NUCs, since they perform a quantization step in separated I/Q components. In this letter, we provide an efficient solution for the 2D-NUCs based on Voronoi regions. Both complexity implications and SNR performance are also analyzed.