Performance of nonlinear detectors in spatial multiplexing for spatially correlated channels

Spatial multiplexing is used in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless systems to increase the data rate. Some nonlinear detectors, such as minimum mean square error (MMSE) Vertical Bell laboratories layered space-time (VBLAST), Maximum A-Posteriori (MMSE VBLAST MAP), and MMSE Improved VBLAST detectors are used in place of a over more complex detector, such as maximum likelihood detector or singular value decomposition based detector. We have presented simulation results of MIMO symbol error rate versus average SNR for MMSE VBLAST MAP and MMSE Improved VBLAST schemes assuming spatially correlated channels for M-ary QAM. We have observed that the performance of MMSE VBLAST MAP and MMSE Improved VBLAST detectors is almost identical in spatially uncorrelated channels. However, in the case of spatially correlated channels, MMSE Improved VBLAST outperforms MMSE VBLAST MAP. We have also seen that complexity of the Improved VBLAST algorithm is higher than the complexity of VBLAST MAP algorithm.