One-Bit Sphere Decoding for Uplink Massive MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs

Abstract: This paper presents a low-complexity near-maximum-likelihood-detection (near-MLD) algorithm called one-bit-sphere-decoding for an uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The idea of the proposed algorithm is to estimate the transmitted symbol vector sent by uplink users (a codeword vector) by searching over a sphere, which contains a collection of codeword vectors close to the received signal vector at the base station in terms of a weighted Hamming distance. To reduce the computational complexity for the construction of the sphere, the proposed algorithm divides the received signal vector into multiple sub-vectors each with reduced dimension. Then, it generates multiple spheres in parallel, where each sphere is centered at the sub-vector and contains a list of sub-codeword vectors. The detection performance of the proposed algorithm is also analyzed by characterizing the probability that the proposed algorithm performs worse than the MLD. The analysis shows how the dimension of each sphere and the size of the sub-codeword list are related to the performance-complexity tradeoff achieved by the proposed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves near-MLD performance, while reducing the computational complexity compared to the existing MLD method.