Flexible N-Way MIMO Detector on GPU

Abstract

This paper proposes a flexible Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) detector on graphics processing units (GPU). MIMO detection is a key technology in broadband wireless system such as LTE, WiMAX, and 802.11n. Existing detectors either use costly sorting for better performance or sacrifice sorting for higher throughput. To achieve good performance with high though put, our detector runs multiple search passes in parallel, where each search pass detects the transmit stream with a different permuted detection order. We show that this flexible detector, including QR decomposition preprocessing, outperforms existing GPU MIMO detectors while maintaining good bit error rate (BER) performance. In addition, this detector can achieve different tradeoffs between throughput and accuracy by changing the number of parallel search passes.