IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO.
12, DECEMBER 2006
Efficient Detection Algorithm for
2Nx2N MIMO Systems using
Alamouti Code and QR Decomposition
Maher Arar, Student Member, IEEE, and Abbas Yongacoglu, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— We propose an efficient 2Nx2N MIMO detection
algorithm where the transmit signals are grouped in pairs
and separately coded using the standard Alamouti space-time
code. At the receiver, one or more QR decompositions are
performed and the upper triangular property of the R matrices
so obtained is exploited in order to successively decode the
transmitted symbols starting with those interference-free symbols
corresponding to the last two rows and columns of R. Bit-error-
rate simulation results, for a 4×4 MIMO system and a bandwidth
efficiency of 8 bits/s/Hz, show that the proposed technique, while
less complex than ordered MMSE V-BLAST, outperforms the
latter by 2-6 dB at a BER of 10−4 .
Index Terms— Alamouti code, QR decomposition, V-BLAST,
successive interference cancellation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I N rich scattering environments, the use of multiple an-
tennas at both ends of the wireless communications link,
referred to as MIMO systems in the literature, has been proven
to provide spectral efficiencies far beyond those offered by
traditional wireless systems [1],[2]. In [3] capacity-achieving
architecture, popularly known as Diagonal Bell Labs Layered
Space-Time (D-BLAST), was proposed. D-BLAST’s main
drawback lied in its complexity for practical implementation
[4]. Albeit less performing, but also less complex than D-
BLAST, Vertical-BLAST (V-BLAST) with Zero Forcing (ZF)
spatial filtering was later proposed [3] and implemented [4]. V-
BLAST with ordered minimum mean-squared error (MMSE)
spatial filtering, hereafter called ordered MMSE V-BLAST,
was shown to greatly outperform all flavors of ZF V-BLAST
[5].
In this letter we will compare the performance of the
proposed algorithm to that of ordered MMSE V-BLAST. It
is worth mentioning at this stage that, unlike ZF V-BLAST,
MMSE V-BLAST assumes perfect knowledge of noise vari-
ance present at the input to the receiver. It is also important to
mention that the first detected symbol using V-BLAST (with
ZF or MMSE filtering) enjoys a diversity of Mr − Mt + 1 [6],
where Mr and Mt represent the number of receive (RX) and
transmit (TX) antennas, respectively.
Because of its successive interference cancellation (SIC)
nature, V-BLAST suffers from an error propagation problem
that prevents it from attaining a significant portion of the
Manuscript received June 20, 2006. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this letter and approving it for publication was Dr. Murat Uysal.
The authors are with the School of Information Technology and Engineer-
ing, University of Ottawa (e-mail: {maherarar@yahoo.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2006.060953.
1089-7798/06$20.00

1
MIMO channel capacity [4]. The effect of error propagation
can be reduced by increasing the diversity of the first detected
symbol. One way to achieve this is to use Mr > Mt . It is
also important to mention that the cost of V-BLAST’s original
implementation, which was based on successively inverting
the channel matrix, was still relatively high, i.e. O(Mt4 ) per
decoded symbol vector [7].
To circumvent the effect of error propagation, most V-
BLAST implementations used a greater number of RX an-
tennas than TX antennas (see [4] for example). We argue
here that this is undesirable from a practical point of view.
One can, for instance, think of a wireless downlink where
the physical size of the user terminal places a restriction
on the number of antennas used. To address the complexity
issue, many authors [7],[8],[9] proposed reduced-complexity
modifications or extensions to V-BLAST. Unfortunately these
modifications or extensions also cause a loss in performance.
Borrowing the idea of SIC from V-BLAST, we present in
this letter a MIMO detection algorithm suitable for systems
where the number of TX antennas Mt is even and equal to the
number of RX antennas Mr , i.e. Mt = Mr = 2N . The pro-
posed algorithm exploits the transmit diversity offered by the
Rate-1 Alamouti code [10] along with the reduced complexity
and numerical stability offered by the QR decomposition.
While the proposed algorithm, hereafter referred to as AQRN-
SIC 1 , has only O(N Mt3 ) complexity (mostly dominated by
the QR decompositions used), it is shown through computer
simulation that it outperforms ordered MMSE V-BLAST by
2-6 dB.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Assumptions and System Model
In reviewing the MIMO detection problem we will assume
that:
• The TX signals undergo independent block Rayleigh
frequency-flat fading.
• The number of TX and RX antennas are even and equal,
i.e. Mt = Mr = 2N .
• Only the receiver has perfect knowledge of Channel State
Information (CSI).
With these assumptions and dropping dependency on sam-
ple time, the baseband time-domain system equation can be
written as
1N denotes the number of QR decompositions used.
c 2006 IEEE
2 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2006

ρ
y = Hs + n (1)
2N

where H is the 2N × 2N channel matrix whose entries

hi,j represent the complex Gaussian gains with zero-mean
and unity-variance between TX antenna j and RX antenna
i, s = [s1 s2 ....s2N ]T is the TX vector with each com-
ponent representing a symbol, generally complex, belonging
to a finite set of symbol alphabet a = [a1 a2 ....aK ] with
1 K 2 T
K k=1 |ak | = 1, and n = [n1 n2 ....n2N ] represents the Fig. 1. 4 × 4 MIMO model with R as the channel matrix.
noise vector at the input to the receiver with elements ni
that are assumed to be uncorrelated with sj and between antennas. This is also true for the general 2N × 2N case. This
themselves, i.e. E(nnH ) = I2N , where E(.) denotes the property will be exploited by the proposed algorithm.
H
expectation operator and n is the Hermitian conjugate of n.
1 C. Alamouti Space-Time Code
The normalization factor 2N ensures that the total transmit
energy is always constrained to 1 and ρ represents the average The Alamouti Space-Time Block Code (STBC) [10], is
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per RX branch. a Rate-1 space-time code. Not only it achieves Maximum-
Likelihood (ML) detection in space and time with high order
B. QR Decomposition of diversity [11], it also allows the use of linear processing
techniques at the receiver, hence greatly reducing the baseband
Any M × M matrix H can be decomposed as H = QR
processing requirements.
where Q is unitary, i.e. QH Q = IM , and
The Alamouti technique consists of transmitting the follow-
⎡ ⎤
r1,1 r1,2 . . . r1,M ing simple space-time code:
⎢ 0 r2,2 . . . r2,M ⎥

⎢ ⎥ s1 s2
R=⎢ . .. .. .. ⎥ (2) C2,2 = . (5)
⎣ .. . . . ⎦ −s∗2 s∗1
0 ... 0 rM,M The columns of this code represent space dimension while
is upper triangular. Using QR decomposition (1) can then be the rows represent time dimension. One can then express the
rewritten as received vector at RX antenna i as follows:







ρ y1,i ρ s1 s2 hi,1 n1,i
y= QRs + n. (3) = + (6)
2N y2,i 2 −s∗2 s∗1 hi,2 n2,i
By multiplying the RX vector y from the left by QH we get
the following transformed RX vector or written differently






y1,i ρ hi,1 hi,2 s1 n1,i

∗ = + (7)
ρ y2,i 2 h∗i,2 −h∗i,1 s2 ñ2,i
ỹ = Rs + ñ. (4) 
  
  
 
2N Hi s ñi
∗
where (.) represents the complex conjugate operator. It is
Note that all ñi still have zero-mean and unity-variance, i.e. H
no noise amplification takes place. It is also easy to verify
not
 hard 2
to show
2
 the orthogonality of Hi , i.e. Hi Hi =
|hi,1 | + |hi,2 | I2 . It is indeed this property that allows the
that R has the same eigenvalue spread as H, and finding Q
use of linear processing at the receiver. To see this, multiply
and R is always possible even when H is ill-conditioned. i.e.
the received vector in (7) by HH i to get the following pre-
when its eigenvalue spread is extremely large. It is easy to
detection estimate:
verify that 2N ! different Q and R matrices can be obtained

Mr Mr
by permuting the columns of H. The cost of computing one ρ 
QR decomposition is O(Mt3 ) [7]. ŝ = (|hi,1 |2 + |hi,2 |2 )s + ñi . (8)
2 i=1 i=1
One rather useful interpretation of the QR decomposition
is that it allows us to reformulate the MIMO detection Equation (8) clearly demonstrates that the Alamouti TX and
problem using a “virtual” channel matrix R rather than the RX processing automatically eliminates multistream interfer-
actual channel matrix H. This transformation has indeed some ence and adds the symbol energy coherently while adding the
useful properties. By inspecting Fig.1, which shows a 4 × 4 noise components incoherently. Note that this is done without
MIMO model using R as the channel matrix, we clearly resorting to matrix inversion, i.e. no noise amplification takes
see that the QR transformation has eliminated interference place. Also note that the diversity order achieved by the
originating from certain TX antennas. Of particular interest Alamouti space-time code is equal to 2 × Mr . In the next
is the interference seen by the last two RX antennas. These section we will use multiple instances of this code to increase
antennas now “see” contributions only from the last two TX the transmit diversity of a 4 × 4 MIMO system.
ARAR and YONGACOGLU: EFFICIENT DETECTION ALGORITHM FOR 2NX2N MIMO SYSTEMS USING ALAMOUTI CODE AND QR DECOMPOSITION
10
MMSE−VBLAST with ordering
AQR1−SIC
AQR2−SIC
AQR2−SIC with 5 Turbo iterations
−1
10
−2
10
BER
−3
10
−4
10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
SNR per bit per recieve antenna (dB)
16
Fig. 2. BER of AQRN-SIC versus ordered MMSE V-BLAST for a 4 × 4
MIMO system with the same bandwidth efficiency of 8 bits/s/Hz.
III. P ROPOSED A RCHITECTURE
We propose to apply the Alamouti space-time code to
the transmitted symbols in pairs of two. At the receiver we
compute the Q and R matrices which we use to compute
a transformed RX vector ỹ. We then start by decoding the
symbols corresponding to the last two rows and columns of R.
After decoding these symbols, we subtract their contribution
from ỹ. We then successively repeat these two steps until no
more symbols are left for decoding.
To improve the performance of the algorithm one can
compute N − 1 additional QR decompositions by performing
column-wise permutations, for a total cost of O(N Mt3 ). As
an example, we can compute an extra QR decomposition for
a 4 × 4 MIMO system by permuting the last two columns
with the first two columns. In this case and before performing
SIC, the base permutation allows us to obtain interference-
free estimates of symbols sj (for j = 3, 4) while the extra
permutation gives us interference-free estimates of symbols sj
(for j = 1, 2). So at this stage we already have soft estimates
of all the transmitted symbols.
In delay-sensitive applications we may choose to stop here
and pass on those estimates to subsequent blocks for further
processing. In delay-tolerant applications one can wait until
the end of the last decoding stage (after SIC is performed) and
average all soft estimates to obtain better decision statistics.
Taking the 4 × 4 case as an example, one obtains, after SIC is
performed, additional estimates of symbols sj (for j = 1, 2)
and additional estimates of symbols sj (for j = 3, 4) using
the base and extra QR decompositions, respectively. One can
also use turbo principles to obtain even further improvement.
When N > 1 QR decompositions are computed and
averaging is performed, the transmit diversity d enjoyed by
each symbol is 3 ≤ d < 3N . This is because when each
pair of symbols is decoded first, no interference exists and
there are only 3 non-zero elements in the last two rows of
R. This diversity increases when N − 1 additional estimates
of the same symbols are obtained in subsequent decoding
stages (and eventually averaged). The less decision errors are
3
made at early decoding stages, the more d approaches 3N ,
only reaching this bound when the probability of error of
the previously detected symbols is zero, which is theoretically
impossible.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
We present here BER simulation results for a 4 × 4 MIMO
system with a bandwidth efficiency of 8 bits/s/Hz. For a fair
comparison, AQRN-SIC (for N=1 and N=2) uses 16QAM
modulation in each subchannel while V-BLAST uses QPSK
in each subchannel. Fig.2 shows the BER curves obtained for
different flavors of AQRN-SIC and ordered MMSE V-BLAST.
We clearly see that all flavors of AQRN-SIC outperform
ordered MMSE V-BLAST. For example, AQR2-SIC and 5
18 20 turbo iterations offers a significant 6 dB coding gain at a BER
of 10−4 . This result is not surprising as each symbol decoded
using AQRN-SIC enjoys a higher level of diversity than the
one decoded using ordered MMSE V-BLAST. This becomes
very clear at high SNR levels where the slope of all AQRN-
SIC curves becomes sharper than the MMSE V-BLAST one.
From Fig.2 we also see that the more complex AQR2-SIC
outperforms AQR1-SIC by 2 dB at a BER of 10−4 . Five Turbo
iterations give us a marginal improvement of 0.6 dB at the
same BER level.
It should be emphasized that the better performance of-
fered by AQRN-SIC is achieved with a lower complexity of
O(N Mt3 ) compared to O(Mt4 ) complexity for ordered MMSE
V-BLAST. Also, as opposed to MMSE V-BLAST, AQRN-SIC
does not require knowledge of noise variance, which may not
be possible to have or may require extra processing to obtain.
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