Layer Error Characteristics of Lattice-Reduction Aided V-BLAST Detectors

Abstract

Recently, lattice reduction aided (LRA) detectors have been introduced into Vertical Bell-Labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) systems to obtain nearly optimal bit error rate (BER) performance for only small additional complexity. In this paper, the layer error characteristics of LRA-V-BLAST detectors are investigated and compared with those of conventional V-BLAST ones. Two important conclusions are drawn for the LRA-V-BLAST detectors. First, the variation of their mean square error (MSE) within each detection iteration is not as large as in conventional V-BLAST detectors. Second, thanks to lattice reduction there exists an inherent sub-optimal detection order from the last to the first layer. These conclusions allow LRA-V-BLAST detectors to avoid optimal ordering to further reduce the complexity. LRA-V-BLAST detectors without optimal ordering are shown to obtain almost the same BER performance of LRA-V-BLAST detector with optimal ordering.