A Computational Paradigm for Space–Time Multiuser Detection

In a general wireless system, cells are loosely defined and user signals appear at multiple antennas with various powers and delays. Despite the enormous performance benefits of system-wide maximum-likelihood multiuser detection (ML MUD), its application to such systems is hampered by the lack of a regular structure. Prior work usually dismisses the possibility on computational grounds as exponential in the total number of users, at least. This paper is the first to address efficient computation of system-wide ML MUD. We present a computational organization that achieves dramatic reduction in complexity through exploitation of the partial overlap of user sets at different antennas. This algorithm, which applies to code-division multiple access or narrowband systems, can be viewed as a spatio-temporal extension of the well-known Viterbi algorithm (VA), and, like the VA, it is derived from dynamic programming principles.