Low-power dynamic MIMO detection for a 4×4 MIMO-OFDM receiver

This paper describes low-power dynamic multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) detection for a 4×4 MIMO-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) receiver. MIMO-OFDM systems achieve high-speed and large capacity communications. However, they impose high computational cost in MIMO detection when separating spatially multiplexed signals and they consume vast amounts of power. We propose low-power dynamic MIMO detection that controls detection speed according to wireless environments. The power consumption is reduced by dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) that controls the operating voltage and clock frequency in the MIMO detector. We implemented dynamic MIMO detection in a pipelined minimum mean square error (MMSE) MIMO detector that we developed in our previous work. A power saving of 92% was achieved under lowest clock frequency mode conditions. key words: wireless communications, MIMO detection, low power, DVFS