On the Complexity of V-BLAST Detection in MIMO Communication Systems

The optimum decoder in the sense of symbol error rate in MIMO communication systems is the maximum likelihood (ML) decoder. But, the computational complexity of ML detection exponentially increases with the number of transmit antennas. Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (BLAST) detection scheme, is an efficient method for transmit signal detection with a moderate computational complexity but with some ttendant increase in SER in compare to ML decoding. The main computational load of V-BLAST detection is due to computation of required nulling vectors in this method, This paper study and compute a relatively exact computational complexity of V-BLAST detection algorithm.