Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) architecture is known to provide high spectral efficiencies. The maximum likelihood (ML) detector can provide the best performance for MIMO systems in terms of the block error rate (BLER). The complexity of the ML detector, however, increases exponentially with the numbers of transmit antennas and signals in the constellation. The zero forcing (ZF) detector has been suggested as a reduced-complexity detection method at the cost of performance degradation.
In order to improve the performance of the ZF detector while reducing the complexity of the ML detector, we propose and investigate the performance of a novel multistage decision method. The proposed scheme is shown to be effective especially at high signal to noise (SNR). Numerical results show that, despite the proposed detector has a lower complexity than the ML detector, the performance difference between the ML and proposed detectors is negligibly small at high SNR.