• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.97-103
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• 2012

A very low complexity QRD-M algorithm based on limited search area is proposed for MIMO systems. The conventional QRD-M algorithm calculates Euclidean distance between all constellation symbols and the temporary detection symbol at each layer. We found that performance will not be degraded even if we adaptively restrict the search area of the candidate symbols only to the neighboring points of temporary detection symbol according to the channel condition at each layer. As a channel condition indicator, we employ the channel gain ratio among the layers without necessity of SNR estimation. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme effectively achieves near optimal performance while maintaining the overall average computation complexity much smaller than the conventional QRD-M algorithm.