J Sign Process Syst DOI 10.1007/s11265-014-0877-0 GPU Acceleration of a Configurable N-Way MIMO Detector for Wireless Systems

Abstract Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless is an enabling technology for high spectral efficiency and has been adopted in many modern wireless communi-cation standards, such as 3GPP-LTE and IEEE 802.11n. However, (optimal) maximum a-posteriori (MAP) detection suffers from excessively high computational complexity, which prevents its deployment in practical systems. Hence, many algorithms have been proposed in the literature that trade-off performance versus detection complexity. In this paper, we propose a flexible N-Way MIMO detector that achieves excellent error-rate performance and high through-put on graphics processing units (GPUs). The proposed detector includes the required QR decomposition step and a tree-search detector, which exploits the massive paral-lelism available in GPUs. The proposed algorithm performs multiple tree searches in parallel, which leads to excellent error-rate performance at low computational complexity on different GPU architectures, such as Nvidia Fermi and Kepler. We highlight the flexibility of the proposed detec-tor and demonstrate that it achieves higher throughput tha