Hardware Implementation of an Iterative Receiver for MIMO-OFDM Systems

Today iterative receivers have proved their efficiency in cancelling interference in the field of wireless communications. However their complexity is often presented as a brake for their use in real systems. In this paper an efficient hardware implementation of an iterative receiver for a 4 × 4 MIMO system is presented. An architecture of MMSE iterative receiver for MIMO-OFDM systems is proposed to limit latency and complexity of the iterative process: MMSE equalization implementation is realized thanks to CORDIC operators; the scheduling between MIMO detection and channel decoding is optimized and specific interleaving functions are introduced to reduce latency and accelerate the convergence process. The implemented receiver is integrated in an hardware testbench and compared in terms of complexity and performance with a non iterative solution.