On the average complexity of sphere decoding in lattice space-time coded multiple-input multiple-output channel

The exact average complexity analysis of the basic sphere decoder for general space-time codes applied to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channel is known to be difficult. In this work, we shed the light on the computational complexity of sphere decoding for the quasi- static, lattice space-time (LAST) coded MIMO channel. Specifically, we drive an upper bound of the tail distribution of the decoder's computational complexity. We show that when the computational complexity exceeds a certain limit, this upper bound becomes dominated by the outage probability achieved by LAST coding and sphere decoding schemes. We then calculate the minimum average computational complexity that is required by the decoder to achieve near optimal performance in terms of the system parameters. Our results indicate that there exists a cut-off rate (multiplexing gain) for which the average complexity remains bounded. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.