Reliability assessment for MIMO detection and its application

We propose a reliability assessment (RA) for multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) detection at the receiver, which can assess whether the output of MIMO detection is reliable or not. First, an analytical formula of the RA is derived to assess the reliability of the receiver's output, a simplified RA is also proposed and a complexity-reduced method is further given by adjusting the threshold of RA, with some potential performance loss compared to the original method. Next we develop a combined detector with simple receiver, advanced receiver and RA module as follows: (1) the initial estimate of transmit symbols is obtained by the simple receiver, assessed by RA in the RA module; (2) if the estimate satisfies the RA, we consider the estimate as the final result; otherwise, the estimate will be through the advanced receiver for further improvement. Finally we give two practical cases of combined detection and run Monte Carlo simulations to confirm the analysis and the efficiency of our proposed combined detection.A key contribution of this paper is a simple analytical formula used to assess whether the detection result is reliable or not at the receiver, which can help the combined detection to sufficiently utilize the output of the simple detection, and estimate part of transmit symbols only using the simple receiver instead of the advanced receiver with negligible performance loss.