Soft Decision Error Assisted Layered Multiuser Detectors for MIMO 2D Spread MC DS-CDMAs

In this paper, we present two layered multiuser detectors (MUDs) for MIMO frequency-time-domain (FT-domain) multi-carrier (MC) direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems with an antenna array at the base station. We assume that multiple users are active and individually utilize multiple transmit antennas in the MC DS-CDMA system. The users are organized into groups, and each user is assigned a unique Time-domain (T-domain) signature code. Moreover, users in the same group share a unique F-domain signature code. As a result, they can exploit the T-domain and F-domain signature codes to spread their multiple symbols in parallel, and then transmit the FT-domain spread signals from the corresponding multiple antennas over the fading channels to the base station. However, because of the non-ideal channel effect and/or the use of non-orthogonal signature codes, the FT-domain spread MC DS-CDMA system is affected by multiple access interference (MAI) in the same way as CDMA-like systems. To mitigate the effects of MAI and improve the system’s performance, we propose two layered MUDs that exploit the layered soft decision errors. Specifically, in a trade-off between the performance and the computational complexity, only the soft decision errors of one user/one group are used in the proposed layered MUDs. The results of simulations and a complexity analysis demonstrate that the proposed layered MUDs outperform existing approaches and the computational complexity is modest.