Computationally efficient soft detection schemes for coded massive MIMO systems

This paper presents a computationally efficient soft detection scheme for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed scheme adopts joint iterative detection and decoding (JIDD) methods for their capacity limiting performances. In addition, the minimum mean square error parallel interference cancellation (MMSE-PIC)-based detection scheme is used for soft information exchange. We propose a number of techniques to reduce the computational complexity, while keeping almost the same performance as the conventional ones. First, a technique is proposed to approximate the Gram matrix to a constant valued diagonal matrix. This proposal can lead to elimination of complex matrix inversion process and multiple layer dependent estimations, resulting in huge complexity reduction. Second, compact equations to estimate soft-symbol values for M-ary (quadrature amplitude modulation) QAM are derived. From the investigation example of 2⁸-QAM in this paper, this proposal showed more than two orders of less computations compared to the conventional scheme. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve approximating performance to the conventional method with a largely reduced computational complexity.