Soft-output MMSE V-BLAST detector under ML channel estimation and channel correlation

Abstract

Channel estimation errors have not been taken into account by existing soft-output minimum mean square error (MMSE) vertical Bell Lab Space Time (V-BLAST) detectors. As a result, the system performance will be degraded under practical channel estimation. In this letter, we propose a novel soft-output MMSE V-BLAST detector, which takes the estimation error of maximum likelihood (ML) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel estimation and receiver spatially correlation into account in the computation of the MMSE filter and log likelihood ratio (LLR) of each coded bit. When compared with existing MMSE V-BLAST detectors, simulation results show that the proposed novel detector can obtain sizable performance gain.