• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.7A
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• pp.632-638
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a fixed-complexity sphere encoder (FSE) for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. The Proposed FSE accomplishes a scalable tradeoff between performance and complexity. Also, because it has a parallel tree-search structure, the proposed encoder can be easily pipelined, leading to a tremendous reduction in the precoding latency. The complexity of the proposed encoder is also analyzed, and we propose two techniques that reduce it. Simulation and analytical results demonstrate that in a $4\times4$ MU-MIMO system, the complexity of the proposed FSE is 16% that of the conventional QRD-M encoder (QRDM-E). Also, the encoding throughput of the proposed endoder is 7.5 times that of the QRDM-E with tolerable degradation in the BER performance, while achieving the optimum diversity order.