The Error Probability of the Fixed-Complexity Sphere Decoder

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The fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) has been previously proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection in order to overcome the two main drawbacks of the sphere decoder (SD), namely its variable complexity and its sequential structure. Although the FSD has shown remarkable quasi-maximum-likelihood (ML) performance and has resulted in a highly optimized real-time implementation, no analytical study of its performance existed for an arbitrary MIMO system. Herein, the error probability of the FSD is analyzed, proving that it achieves the same diversity as the maximum-likelihood detector (MLD) independent of the constellation used. In addition, it can also asymptotically yield ML performance in the high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Those two results, together with its fixed complexity, make the FSD a very promising algorithm for uncoded MIMO detection.