ML symbol detection for MIMO systems in the presence of channel estimation errors

In wireless communication, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is a well-known approach to improve the reliability as well as the data rate. In MIMO systems, channel state information (CSI) is typically required at the receiver to detect transmitted signals; however, in practical systems, the CSI is imperfect and contains errors, which affect the overall system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel maximum likelihood (ML) scheme for MIMO systems that is robust to the CSI errors. We apply an optimization method to estimate an instantaneous covariance matrix of the CSI errors in order to improve the detection performance. Furthermore, we propose the employment of the list sphere decoding (LSD) scheme to reduce the computational complexity, which is capable of efficiently finding a reduced set of the candidate symbol vectors for the computation of the covariance matrix of the CSI errors. An iterative detection scheme is also proposed to further improve the detection performance.