Fast group detection for massive MIMOs

In this study, the authors consider symbol detection at the receiver of the base station for uplink massive multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) systems over a fading channel, in which the base station uses a large number of antennas to serve many users. First, the authors review the existing detection methods such as the minimum mean square error and Vertical‐Bell Laboratories Layered Space Time (V‐BLAST). In addition, because the bit error rate (BER) performance of V‐BLAST is close to that of the optimal method, the authors describe the procedures of the V‐BLAST in detail. Then, to achieve a satisfactory trade‐off between the BER performance and the computational complexity for practical implementation in massive MIMO systems, the authors propose a fast group‐based symbol detection scheme. They also derive the expressions needed to select the symbol indices of a group for detection. Our simulation results and complexity analysis show that the performance of the proposed scheme is close to that of the V‐BLAST algorithm with a significant saving in computational complexity.