Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) significantly increases the throughput of a communication system by employing multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver. To extract maximum performance from a MIMO system, a computationally intensive search based detector is needed. To meet the challenge of MIMO detection, typical suboptimal MIMO detectors are ASIC or FPGA designs. We aim to show that a MIMO detector on Graphic processor unit (GPU), a low-cost parallel programmable co-processor, can achieve high throughput and can serve as an alternative to ASIC/FPGA designs. However, careful architecture aware software design is needed to leverage the performance offered by GPU. We propose a novel soft MIMO detection algorithm, multi-pass trellis traversal (MTT), and show that we can achieve ASIC/FPGAlike performance and handle different configurations in software on GPU. The proposed design can be used to accelerate wireless physical layer simulations and to offload MIMO detection processing in wireless testbed platforms.
Abstract-Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is an existing technique that can significantly increase throughput of the system by employing multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver. Realizing maximum benefit from this technique requires computationally intensive detectors which poses significant challenges to receiver design. Furthermore, a flexible detector or multiple detectors are needed to handle different configurations. Graphical Processor Unit (GPU), a highly parallel commodity programmable co-processor, can deliver extremely high computation throughput and is well suited for signal processing applications. However, careful architecture aware design is needed to leverage performance offered by GPU. We show we can achieve good performance while maintaining flexibility by employing an optimized trellis-based MIMO detector on GPU.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.