Mitigating error propagation in successive interference cancellation

In this letter, we propose a novel signal detection method for spatially multiplexed multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, based on the idea of ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC). In the proposed method, we try every possible value as the first detected symbol instead of making a decision. Although the proposed method requires slightly increased complexity compared to the conventional OSIC, the proposed method eliminates the error propagation from the first detected symbol, so it offers significantly better error performance compared to the conventional OSIC. We compare the proposed method with previous ML, ML-DFE, QRD-M, MMSE, MMSE-OSIC detection methods in terms of the error performance and the computational complexity, and show that the proposed method offers a good performance-complexity trade-off.