Sphere Decoding for Distributed Antenna Systems

Abstract

Distributed antenna system (DAS) is one of the promising techniques for next generation wireless communication. In this paper, we firstly present a relatively efficient sphere decoding algorithm (SDA) that performs exact maximumlikelihood (ML) decoding for distributed antenna systems, which does not necessarily require that the number of receive antennas should be no less than that of transmit antennas. Some simulation results in frequency selective fading channel show that bit error rate (BER) performance is influenced by the difference of channel propagation time delays from neighboring transmit antennas to the receive antenna. The increase of difference can result in BER performance improvement.