Enhanced groupwise detection with a new receive combiner for spatial multiplexing MIMO systems

In this letter, we propose a new groupwise receive combiner design for multiple-input multiple-output spatial multiplexing systems. The conventional group detection (GD) suffers from a considerable performance loss since the noise components are not taken into account. The output signal-to-interference- plus-noise ratio (SINR) is defined in each subgroup in order to consider both the desired signal and noise statistics. Adopting the real-valued representation, we provide an optimal receive combiner which maximizes the SINR with a general group size. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a large performance gain over the conventional GD in coded systems. Also, when combining with near-optimal detection algorithms such as sphere decoder, the proposed GD scheme offers a comparable performance with significant reduced complexity.