Alternating Multiuser Detection with Soft Interference Cancellation for Heterogeneous-Signaling MIMO CDMA Systems

This paper presents an effective alternating multiuser detector for the uplink of heterogeneous-signaling multiple-input multiple-output code division multiple access systems over multipath fading channels, where the data are transmitted using either spatially multiplexing for high transmission rate or space-time block code for transmit diversity gains. The new MUD first separates users into two groups according to their transmission signaling schemes and then detects the transmitted symbols in each group alternately with the removal of iteratively refined soft information-assisted multiple access interference to enhance the interference cancellation capability. Moreover, for practical low-complexity implementations, the users in each group are further partitioned into smaller subgroups based on their effective channel correlations and then detected in parallel by a bank of minimum mean-squared error soft detectors to further reduce the computational load. Conducted simulations show that the proposed MUD can render superior performance compared with previous approaches, especially in highly loaded scenarios.