Faster than sphere (decoder). A demodulation algorithm for multidimensional constellations

摘要

This paper1 proposes an algorithm, named hypercube demodulator, for symbol detection in multidimensional constellations as an alternative to the widely used sphere decoder. We use relative complexity of algorithms in order to measure the gain of one solution over the other. As a part of the theoretical considerations the upper and lower bounds for performance gain of the hypercube demodulator over the sphere decoder are derived, showing that the former can lead to up to ten times better performance than the latter. The measurement and comparison of relative execution time of computer simulations using both solutions verifies the theory. The presented solution achieves the same BER as the referenced technique.