CONECCT 2015 1570130641

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Low complexity detection algorithm for Alamouti

like STBC for Large MIMO systems
Saurabh Gupta, Jatin Yadav and Rakhesh Singh Kshetrimayum, Senior Member, IEEE
Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering
IIT Guwahati
Assam, India, 781039
{saurabh2479, jyadav2007}@gmail.com and krs@iitg.ernet.in

of antennas are employed) is a potential technology for meeting the demand. A key challenge in practically realizing the
large-MIMO systems is the detection complexity at receiver.
Recently, it has gained more attention because of certain
algorithms from machine learning and artifical intelligence,
which have shown to achieve near-optimal performance at
low complexities in large-MIMO systems with tens of antennas [9]-[11]. A low-complexity detection for large-MIMO
based on local neighbourhood search, named likelihood accent
search (LAS) has been proposed for BPSK in [9] and M-QAM
in [10]. A Gibbs sampling based large-MIMO detection is
proposed in [11].
In this work, we propose Alamouti like STBC for transmission in large-MIMO systems and its detection using a heuristic
based search algorithm, termed as Tabu search [12], [13]. In
Tabu search, we require to initialize the initial solution vector
at random. We propose to initialize the initial solution vector
with the solution of Zero-forcing (ZF) and Minimum mean
square error (MMSE) [14] to improve the performance of
detection. Our simulation results shows that the new proposed
variant of Tabu search performs better than the conventional
Tabu search and is also comparable to Maximum likelihood
(ML) solution for the 4-QAM case. ML cannot be used in
large MIMO because of its exponential increase in decoding
complexity with number of antennas.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.
Section II describes the system model considered in our
work. It comprises of transmitter and receiver design. Subsection II-A describes the proposed Alamouti like STBC
and subsection II-B describes the low complexity detection
algorithm named Tabu search and its pseudo code. Simulation
results for various MIMO configuration and decoding schemes
are presented and analysed in Section III. Finally, Section IV
presents the conclusion of the paper.

AbstractThis paper presents Alamouti like STBC for large

MIMO systems and its low complexity detection using Tabu
search. Large MIMO systems are of primary concern in the
deployment of 5G. We propose a solution of using Alamouti
like STBC for the transmitter design and decoding the received
signal using a heuristic based search algorithm named Tabu
search. Our results show that low complexity detection technique
performs better than decoding techniques like Zero Forcing (ZF)
and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) while is comparable
to Maximum Likelihood (ML). We consider Rayleigh channel for
all the simulations.
Index TermsLarge-MIMO systems, tabu search, lowcomplexity detection, Alamouti, Zero-Forcing, Minimum mean
square error

I. I NTRODUCTION
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems have gained interests due to their ability to
increase the systems reliability and capacity. MIMO systems
capacity is known to increase linearly with the minimum of
number of transmit and receive antennas [1]. The current
fourth generation (4G) wireless standards like LTE/LTE-A
have used MIMO systems to achieve significantly high spectral
efficiency and data rates. MIMO systems invention [2] led
to introduction of multiantenna coding scheme called Space
Time code (STC) [3]. Two main types of STC are Space
Time Trellis Code (STTC) and Space Time Block Code
(STBC). STBC is more popular because of its low complexity
detection in comparison to STTC. In STBC, all the signals
decouple at the receiver due to its orthogonal design making
the detection process much more simplified at the receiver.
STBC is designed on the basis of rank and determinant criteria
[4]. The simplest STBC was invented by Alamouti in 1998
[5], this code achieves full transmit diversity for two transmit
antenna (i.e. Nt =2) and have rate 1. Alamouti STBC is an
example of Orthogonal Space Time Block Code (OSTBC).
The major disadvantage of OSTBC is that it is not possible
to design full rate and full diversity complex OSTBC for Nt
larger than 2[6].
MIMO techniques will play a key role in further increasing
the wireless data rates to the Gigabit range targeted for the fifth
generation (5G) standards. In the next few years, demand for
wireless communication is projected to grow rapidly [7],[8].
Large MIMO systems (i.e. MIMO systems where large number

II. S YSTEM M ODEL

We consider a MIMO wireless communication system
model with Nt transmit and Nr receive antennas as shown
in Fig 1. The path gains are assumed to be independent and
identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh faded.
The system output can be expressed as

978-1-4799-9985-9/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

1

low complexity decoding algorithms and in the subsequent

sections of this paper, we highlight the performance of Tabu
Search and its modifications against varying situations to
observe its speed as well as accuracy in tackling the problems
put forward by Large MIMO System.
Pseudo Code

Fig. 1.

Data: Empty Tabu Array of pre-determined size

Initialization: Init vector Choose Initialization
vector;
sol vector Initialization vector;
cf val Cost function value;
while Iterations <Max. Iterations do
Index val Choose Random index in Init vector;
while Index val in Tabu Array do
Index val Choose another random index;
end
Append Index val to Tabu Array;
Modify value in Init vector at Index val index;
new cf val Evaluated Cost function;
if new cf val <cf val then
sol vector Modified Init vector;
cf val new cf val;
end
end
Return: sol vector

System model consisting of Nt transmit and Nr receive antennas

r
Y=

Ex
HXc + N
Nt

(1)

where Y CNr X2 is the received signal matrix over 2

time slots and Xc CNt X2 is the space time block code
matrix which is sent over the channel coefficient matrix H,
whose each entry is independent and identically distributed
(i.i.d) complex Gaussian random variable with zero mean and
unit variance and N CNr X2 is the noise matrix with i.i.d
zero mean and No variance complex Gaussian elements. Ex
is the energy per symbol at each transmitter.
The channel coefficient matrix looks like

h11
h12 . . . h1Nt
h21
h22 . . . h2Nt

H= .
..
..
..
..
.
.
.
hNr 1 hNr 2 . . . hNr Nt

The Algorithm : Tabu Search starts by choosing one

random solution from the solution space. The choice of this
initial solution can incorporate information, if any, about the
distribution and modality of the solution space. However,
even in cases where not much is known about the solution
space, Tabu Search can provide good decoding accuracies with
enough iterations.
After the choice of the initial choice of the solution, the
value of the cost function to be minimised (or maximised)
is calculated and stored. Tabu period is the duration or the
number of iterations till which the value at a particular index
cannot be modified once its been changed. A Tabu array
is formed which will contain all the indices of the solution
that cannot be changed because they still lie in the Tabu
period. Now an index in this solution is chosen at random.
Its first checked to see whether or not this index lies in the
Tabu array and if not, then the value in the solution in that
index is replaced with another value from the solution space.
Again, the cost function is calculated and if found to be lower
than the previous value, the modified solution replaces the
old solution. For stopping the algorithm, we can either decide
on a convergence value or specify the maximum number of
iterations to search in.
Another modification that can be added to this is to start the
Tabu Search with multiple initial solutions chosen at random
and then applying the algorithm to each of those chosen
solutions. The minimum of cost function values from all those
solutions is deemed as the best solution obtained.

A. Transmitter Design
We consider extension of 2 X 2 Alamouti Space Time Block
Code (STBC) [5] for Nt transmit antennas i.e. our transmission consist of two time slots. In the first time slot we send Nt
symbols over Nt transmit antennas and in the next time slot,
we send the conjugates of the symbols sent in the first time
slot similar to the Alamouti scheme. This transmission scheme
has an advantage in terms of increased decoding accuracy
over V-BLAST architecture because sending the same symbols
repeatedly over two times slots in comparison to one has more
probability of correct decoding at the receiver.
The Alamouti like STBC will look like

x1
x2
x2
x1

..

..
.

xNt 1
xNt
xNt
xNt 1
B. Tabu Search
Tabu Search is a heuristic based algorithm employed in
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. In the case of
large MIMO where Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding can
get quite complex and computationally expensive, we turn to

zero mean and No variance. Variance of noise i.e. No is set

according to the SNR used for the simulation. All simulations
are done on quad core i5 processor at 2.30 GHz with 4 Gb
DDR3 RAM.
For the implementation of Tabu search as the decoding
scheme, we use 100 neighbours (modified vectors) for each
initialized random solution. Fig 2. and Fig 3. shows the BER
or decoding accuracy and time per iteration (in second) vs
number of random solutions chosen to initialize the Tabu
search for the 8 X 8 MIMO system with 4-QAM and 16QAM. The plots show, as we increase the number of random
solution for initializing the Tabu search, the decoding accuracy
improves because the algorithm is able to search more part of
the solution space. Depending on the requirement we can make
a trade-off between accuracy and speed as and when we see
fit.
In case of 4-QAM, the BER performance of Tabu search
with 29 randomly initialized solutions is quiet close to the
ML performance while only taking a fraction of the time. The
accuracy of ML was observed to be 85.05% while for the
case of Tabu Search it is 82.07%. Also in the case of ML, we
need to compute 48 = 65536 cost functions to get the solution
while the Tabu search needs only 29 X 100 = 2900. But with
16-QAM, the Tabu search result deviates from ML.

The algorithm can provide satisfactory results even in situations where there is no information about the solution space
simply because its highly improbable that the initial solution
vector chosen and the neighbourhoods searched will have all
incorrect entries in them. Given enough number of iterations
to perform over a number of initial solution vectors, Tabu
Search can get good results by only searching a fraction of
the solution space while substantially reducing computational
costs. Also, this algorithm is very easily modifiable to suit the
nature and complexity of the problem its addressing.
C. Receiver Design
At, the receiver we employ Tabu Search to minimise our
cost function which is :


r


Ex


(2)
HX
Y


Nt
We tried a number of different combinations, including Zero
Forcing and MMSE decoding with Tabu Search and evaluated
the performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) or decoding
accuracy and speed. For Tabu search, we select a Nt X 1
solution vector for initialization from the appropriate QAM,
and encode it in the Alamouti-like scheme described above
and calculate the cost function value for this vector. We then
modify this vector according to Tabu Search algorithm and
calculate the cost function value for each modified vector. The
vector corresponding to the minimum of the cost function values is taken as the best solution for that particular transmission.
To improve the performance, we propose to initialize the
randomly chosen solution with the solution of ZF and MMSE.
This ensures that the decoding accuracy is at least that of ZeroForcing or MMSE. The solution for Zero Forcing is given as
:
x
= (HH H)1 HH y
(3)
whereas, for MMSE its given by:
x
= CH y
where,
C=

Ex
Nt

1
Ex H
H H + n2 I
H
Nt

(4)

(5)
Fig. 2. Decoding accuracy vs number of random solution for 4-QAM and
16-QAM for 8 x 8 system

and x
, y are estimated transmitted signal vector and received
signal vector in one time slot. I is identity matrix of appropriate size n and (.)H is hermitian transpose operator.
Previous approach has been verified through simulation, which
is presented in next section.

Fig 4. shows the comparison of different MIMO configurations with 4-QAM in terms of BER or decoding accuracy for
Tabu search.
Fig 5. contains the comparison for different decoding techniques for the transmitted Alamouti like STBC for 8 X 8
MIMO system with 4-QAM. First we obtain the BER or
decoding accuracy results by simply applying Zero-forcing
(ZF) and Minimum mean square error (MMSE) decoding
techniques. Then we compare these results with Tabu search
by choosing the initialized solution vector randomly and
through ZF and MMSE. It should be noted here that these
results (also specified in Table I) are obtained using only one

III. S IMULATION R ESULTS

The simulation results presented in this section have been
performed for wireless communication system with same
number of transmit and receive antennas. We consider 105 bits
of information to be sent over Rayleigh faded channel using
the above proposed Almouti like STBC. Each entry of channel
matrix is generated i.i.d. complex Gaussian with zero mean
and unit variance. Noise is also i.i.d complex Gaussian with

is expected since choosing the initial vector this way we dont

take into consideration any information about the solution
space or the nature of the problem. To overcome this hurdle
we propose to initialize the Tabu search algorithm with the
solution of ZF and MMSE. As expected the performance of
both these decoding technique improves with increasing SNR.

Fig. 3. Time per iteration vs number of random solution for 4-QAM and
16-QAM for 8 x 8 system

Fig. 5.

Decoding accuracy vs SNR for 8 x 8 systems using 4-QAM

IV. C ONCLUSION
This work has put forward the use of heuristic based
algorithms for solving the computational complexity issue of
Large MIMO systems. These systems are employed to enhance
data rates and hence the ease and speed of decoding data play
a major role in deciding on the decoding techniques used.
Algorithms like Tabu Search, that can produce satisfactory
results while cutting down on the number of computations,
become essential in this case. Even without the knowledge of
the problem statement, Tabu Search manages a good accuracy
rate. With proper initialization, these rates grow positively.
Also, the algorithm is flexible enough to allow us where we
want to trade-off between speed and accuracy.

Fig. 4. Decoding accuracy vs number of random solution chosen for different

MIMO configuration

initialization vector and cannot be used to compare with the

ML performance. From Fig 2, we observe that the performance
of 29 initialization vectors for randomly initialized Tabu
Search (82.07%) is close to that of ML (85.05%) at SNR = 1.
We observe from the plot that increasing SNR has no effect
on the performance of randomly initialized Tabu search. This

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TABLE I
C OMPARISON OF DECODING ACCURACY OF DIFFERENT DECODING
SCHEMES

SNR
(in dB)

RTS

Zero
Forcing

MMSE

0.1
1
2
3
4
5

68.89
68.80
69.44
69.75
69.81
70.37

63.88
63.56
67.06
68.93
71.25
73.44

64.53
65.89
67.65
69.35
71.55
73.76

ZF
initialized
RTS
69.00
70.21
71.00
72.56
73.97
75.34

MMSE
initialized
RTS
69.55
70.55
71.46
72.59
74.16
76.11

ML

81.73
85.05
88.00
90.44
92.10
93.58

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