2016 23rd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT)
Towards Efficient Design of Fixed-point Iterative
Receiver for Coded MIMO-OFDM Systems
Rida El Chall 1 , Fabienne Nouvel 1 , Maryline Hélard 1 , Yvan Kokar 1 , and Ming Liu
1
INSA, IETR, CNRS UMR 6164, F-35708 Rennes, France
2
Beijing Key Lab of Transportation Data Analysis and Mining, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China
Email:{relchall, fabienne.nouvel, maryline.helard, yvan.kokar}@insa-rennes.fr, mingliu@bjtu.edu.cn
Abstract—In recent years, iterative receiver has been widely
considered since it is able to achieve high data rates and reliable
communications for coded MIMO-OFDM systems. However,
such a receiver is extremely challenging in practical implementa-
tion. In this paper, we present an efficient fixed-point arithmetic
of iterative receiver based on low-complexity K-Best decoder in
order to reduce the hardware costs in terms of area and execution
time. The performance of fixed-point receiver is then evaluated
with different modulation orders and channel models. Moreover,
a testbed for MIMO-OFDM system using wireless open access
research platform (WARP) is introduced in order to evaluate the
performance of the receiver under real system conditions.
Index Terms—Iterative receiver; MIMO; K-Best decoder;
Turbo decoder; Fixed-point arithmetic; WARP platform.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In future wireless communication system, the demand for
high rate data and reliable transmission is rapidly increasing.
Modern techniques have been adopted into the emerging stan-
dards such as IEEE 802.11, 802.16, DVB-NGH, 3GPP long
term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). Among
these techniques, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) tech-
nology which utilizes multiple antennas at transmitter and re-
ceiver offers an increase of channel capacity and link reliabil-
ity [1]. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
technique is generally combined with MIMO technique to
combat the inter-symbol interference in multi-path propagation
and to achieve better spectral efficiency. Meanwhile, advanced
forward correction codes such as turbo codes are able to
achieve performance close to theoretical limits [2].
In such a coded MIMO-OFDM system, iterative receiver
is used to cancel the co-antenna interference and to achieve
near capacity [3]. Such a receiver consists of soft-input soft-
output (SISO) detector and channel decoder that exchange
soft reliable information. Several sub-optimal detectors have
been proposed in the literature to reduce the complexity
of maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detector. These
solutions include linear equalization, interference cancellation
and tree search-based detection. Examples include minimum
mean square error-interference cancellation (MMSE-IC) [4],
single tree search sphere decoder (STS-SD) [5], K-Best de-
coder [6] and fixed sphere decoder (FSD) [7]. K-Best and FSD
Ming Liu is supported by the NSFC Grant (61501022), BJTU Founds
(15RC00040), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
(2014JBZ003).
978-1-5090-1990-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
2
algorithms perform a breadth-first search and are hence more
attractive in practical implementation than STS-SD as they
offer a best trade-off between performance and complexity [8].
Theoretically, floating-point representation is typically used
to evaluate the performance of the system. However, when
considering practical systems, fixed-point design must be
considered for an efficient use in terms of area and execution
time. The conversion into a fixed-point format requires to
specify a finite word length with a specific number of bits for
integer parts and for fractional parts. However, this conversion
has a great impact on the performance of the system due
to the reduced dynamic range and the precision inaccuracy.
Additionally, in real transmission several aspects have to be
considered in the receiver design such as synchronization,
channel estimation and front-end radio-frequency (RF) mod-
ules (e.g. amplifier, filter, ADC, DAC).
In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate
the impact of real aspects on the performance of the iterative
receiver. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II provides the MIMO-OFDM system model and the principle
of iterative detection and decoding. Low-complexity K-Best
based MIMO detector is introduced in section III. Section
IV illustrates the process of the conversion of the receiver
into fixed-point format. The BER performance of the iterative
receiver is then evaluated in section V. Section VI presents
the testbed for MIMO-OFDM system using wireless open
access research platform (WARP) and the results of wireless
measurements. We conclude the paper in section VII.
II. MIMO-OFDM S YSTEM M ODEL
We consider a MIMO-OFDM system with Nt transmit
antennas and Nr receive antennas (Nr ≥ Nt ) as depicted
in Figure 1. At the transmitter, the information bits u are
first encoded. The coded bits c are then interleaved and gray-
mapped into complex symbols of 2Q quadrature amplitude
modulation (QAM) constellation, where Q is the number of
bits per symbol. The symbols are then spatially multiplexed
over Nt transmit antennas. IFFT is applied to Nc parallel
symbols to obtain the time domain OFDM symbols, where
Nc is the number of sub-carriers. The symbols are then sent
though the radio channel after the insertion of the cyclic prefix
(CP) which is assumed larger than the maximum excess delay
of the channel. At the receiver, after the removal of the CP,
 2016 23rd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT)

FFT is performed to get the frequency domain received vector where d1 represents the Euclidean distance between the re-
yk = [y1 , y2 , ..., yNr ]T that can be expressed as: ceived vector y and a lattice point Hs. χ+1 −1
i,b and χi,b denote
the sets of symbol vectors in which the bth bit of the ith
yk = Hk sk + nk , k = 1...Nc , (1)
antenna equal to +1 and −1 respectively. P (s) represents the
where k is the index of sub-carriers. For simplicity, the sub- a priori information provided by the channel decoder in the
carrier index k is omitted in the sequel. H is the Nr ×Nt chan- form of a priori LLRs.
nel matrix with its (i, j)th element hi,j the channel frequency With the real-valued model, the channel matrix H can be
response of the channel link from j th transmit antenna to decomposed into a unitary matrix Q and an upper triangular
ith receive antenna. n = [n1 , n2 , ..., nNr ]T is an independent matrix R. Exploiting the triangular nature of R, the detection
and identically distributed (i.i.d) additive white Gaussian noise problem can be viewed as a tree search problem of 2Nt
(AWGN) vector with zero mean and σn2 variance. levels. Starting from the root node at level 2Nt + 1, the
Transmitter
Euclidean distance metric d1 can be recursively evaluated
࢛ ࢉ ࢋ ࢞ MIMO
IFFT ‫ܛ‬ through the accumulated partial Euclidean distance (PED) di
Channel
Encoder Π
Mapping
QAM Mapper
‫ڭ‬ with d2Nt +1 = 0 as follows [5]:
IFFT
 2
 2Nt 
۶   
di = di+1 + ỹi − Ri,j sj  i = 2Nt , ..., 1
 j=i 
Receiver
 
ࡵ࢏࢔
ො ෝ
࢞ FFT ‫ܡ‬
ෝ
࢛ Channel ࢉ mC
‫ڭ‬
Demapper MIMO
i (5)
Decoder ‫ܮ‬ Π-1 ‫ܮ‬ QAM
஺ଶ ாଵ Detector Q/2
N0 
FFT
‫ܮ‬ாଶ ࡵ࢕࢛࢚
Soft ‫ܮ‬஺ଵ + (|LA (xi,b )| − xi,b LA (xi,b )),
Π
Mapper 2
b=1
Fig. 1: MIMO-OFDM system block diagram using bit interleaved coded  
modulation with iterative detection and decoding. mA
i

The task of the receiver is to recover the transmitted symbols where mC A

i and mi denote the channel-based partial metric and
from co-antenna interference. An iterative detection-decoding the a priori-based partial metric at the ith level, respectively.
process can be therefore performed as shown in Figure 1. K-Best decoder performs a breadth-first search in the tree
The MIMO detector and the channel decoder exchange soft by expanding each of the K survival paths to all possible
information in terms of log-likelihood ratio (LLR). The MIMO children nodes in the constellation. Then, the K-Best decoder
detector takes the received symbol vector y and the a priori √
computes and sorts all K 2Q PEDs and keeps only the K
information LA1 of the coded bits from the channel decoder nodes with minimum distances until reaching the leaf nodes.
and computes the extrinsic information LE1 . This extrinsic In the case of iterative receiver, a list L of the most promising
information is de-interleaved and becomes the a priori infor- candidates is used in the computation of LLR values:
mation LA2 for the channel decoder. The channel decoding
1 1
is performed by an LTE turbo decoder, which exchanges L (xi,b ) = min {d1 } − min {d1 } . (6)
soft information between their inner decoders. In our iterative N0 L∩χi,b
−1 N0 L∩χ+1
i,b

process, we denote the number of outer iterations between The major drawbacks of K-Best decoder are the expansion
the MIMO detector and the channel decoder by Iout and the and the sorting operations that are very time consuming.
number of iterations within the turbo decoder by Iin . The low-complexity K-Best (LC-K-Best) decoder recently
The complex-valued system model can be decomposed into proposed uses two improvements over the classical one for the
an equivalent 2Nr × 2Nt real-valued system as follow: sake of lower complexity and latency [9]. The first improve-
      
Re (y) Re (H) − Im (H) Re (s) Re (n) ment simplifies the hybrid enumeration of the constellation
= + ,
Im (y) Im (H) Re (H) Im (s) Im (n) points with the real-valued system model when the a priori
(2) information is incorporated into the tree search using two
where Re (.) and Im (.) represent the real and the imaginary look-up tables. The second improvement is to use a relaxed
parts of the variables, respectively. This equivalent model will on-demand expansion that reduces the need of exhaustive
be adopted in our work. expansion and sorting operations [8], [9].
III. L OW- COMPLEXITY K-B EST D ETECTION IV. F IXED - POINT CONVERSION
In the case of iterative MIMO receiver, with the max-log- The conversion into a fixed-point format requires to specify
MAP approximation, the LLR of the bth bit in the ith transmit a finite word length with a specific number of bits for integer
symbol, xi,b , can be computed as [3]: parts (dynamic range) and for fractional parts (precision). This
1 1 conversion significantly reduces the hardware costs in terms
L (xi,b ) ≈ min {d1 } − min {d1 } , (3) of area and execution time. Two distinct approaches can be
N0 χ−1
i,b
N 0 χ+1
i,b
used to evaluate the fixed-point representation of the system:
2
d1 = y − Hs − N0 log P (s) (4) simulation based approaches and analytical approaches. The
 2016 23rd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT)

TABLE I: Fixed-point representation of receiver variables.

analytical approaches try to find mathematical expressions that
are difficult to be evaluated in case of non linear and iterative Parameters (iwl,f wl)
systems. Therefore in our study, simulation based approaches Constellation symbol s(sRe , sIm ) (2,9)
used in iterative process are considered to convert floating- Channel coefficients hij (3,7)
Channel
point system into a fixed-point one. Our iterative receiver is Noise variance N0 (1,10)
hence decomposed into two sub-blocks, i.e. K-Best decoder LLR (4,3)
and turbo decoder, through which the required fixed-point Turbo decoder γ̄ (5,3)
ᾱ, β̄ (6,3)
representation length of each variable is determined. The
different steps for the conversion of the receiver into a fixed- y (4,7)
Dist di U(5,7), U(5,9)∗
point format is summarized in Figure 2. Q (3,7), (3,9)
K-Best decoder
Floating-point receiver R (4,7), (4,9)
K-Best channel ỹ (4,7), (4,9)
decoder decoder LLR (4,3)
∗ U refer to unsigned fixed-point arithmetic.
First variable
Range evaluation
݅‫݈ݓ‬ based on a 4 × 4 spatially multiplexed MIMO-OFDM system.
Fixed-point
conversion Precision evaluation
Rayleigh channel model is first used. Then extended typical
݂‫݈ݓ‬ urban (ETU) channel model of 3GPP LTE(A) is considered in
order to evaluate the performance of the fixed-point receiver in
Not acceptable
Performance ݂‫ ݈ݓ‬+1
more realistic scenarios. ETU channel has a larger excess delay
evaluation (τrms = 991 ns) and simulates extreme urban, suburban and
Acceptable rural environments. For all cases, the channel is assumed to be
Move to next variable
perfectly known at the receiver. Table II shows the principle
Implementation parameters of the simulations.
Fig. 2: Fixed-point conversion process. TABLE II: Simulation Parameters.
MIMO system 4 × 4 Spatial multiplexing
For a variable in the sub-block, we evaluate its dynamic Modulation 2Q -QAM (4, 16, 64)-QAM, Gray mapping
range and its precision. We denote by iwl the number of bits Flat Rayleigh fading
Channel type
ETU (τmax = 5000 ns , τrms = 991 ns, fm = 300 Hz)
for integer part which corresponds to the dynamic range and
Number of sub-carriers N (Nc ) 1024 samples (600 used)
by f wl the number of bits of fractional part corresponding Cyclic Prefix (CP) Normal 5.2μs-4.7 μs
Bandwidth 10 MHz
to the precision. The dynamic range (iwl) of each variable is Carrier frequency fc 2.4GHz
estimated by determining its maximum and minimum value Detector
Single tree-search (STS)
LC-K-Best decoder (K = 8, 16, 32)
through examining its histogram under simulations to avoid Channel decoder
LTE turbo code [13, 15]o
Rc = 1/2, 3/4, Block Length Kb = 2, 048 bits
overflow problem. The precision is determined by specify- Interleaver Random, size = 2, 048
ing a minimum number of fractional bits (f wl). Next, the Iteration number Outer Iout = 4 , Inner Iin = 2
performance of the system is evaluated and compared with
the floating-point receiver considered as a reference. In most Figure 3 depicts BER results of the fixed-point receiver in
communication system, BER is used as a metric for the the case of Rayleigh fading channels. The simulations show
performance evaluation. If the performance of the system that fixed-point algorithm achieves a performance close to the
is not acceptable, we increase the precision of this variable floating-point one in the case of 4-QAM and 16-QAM. A
while keeping the other variables unchanged. If a desired performance loss of 0.2 dB at BER level of 10−5 is observed
performance is obtained, we move to the next variable in compared to STS-SD. However, in the case of 64-QAM with a
the sub-block. We repeat this procedure to get the fixed- coding rate of Rc = 3/4 the retained quantization parameters
point representation length for all variables in the receiver. entail a BER performance loss of 0.25 dB at a BER level of
A quantization of turbo decoder variables is first carried out 2 × 10−5 . We show that this gap is reduced by increasing the
followed by a quantization of the K-Best decoder variables accuracy of the accumulated distance metric. A precision of 9
including the channel coefficients and received signal. Table bits is sufficient to achieve a performance close to floating-
I summarizes the retained fixed-point representation obtained point one in this case. An accuracy of 9 bits for distance
through long simulations. metrics and QRD are therefore adopted.
Figure 4 shows the BER performance of the fixed-point
V. S IMULATION R ESULTS receiver in the case of ETU channel. The results show that
In this section, we evaluate the BER performance of the fixed-point representation presents similar performance as the
retained fixed-point format of K-Best based receiver with reference floating-point curves in the case 4-QAM and 16-
different modulation orders. A detailed analysis of the per- QAM. However, there is a performance loss of less than 0.2
formance and the complexity trade-off of iterative receiver dB in the case of 64-QAM at a BER level of 1×10−4 . We can
with various MIMO detection methods has been discussed see that STS-SD slightly outperforms LC-K-Best decoder by
in [8]. Herein, the floating-point curves of STS-SD and LC- about 0.2 dB with 4-QAM, 16-QAM and 0.1 dB with 64-QAM
K-Best decoder are plotted as a reference. The simulations are at a BER level of 1×10−4 . Hence our fixed-point arithmetic is
 2016 23rd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT)

able to achieve a performance close to floating-point one if the WARP platform is controlled by the host computer using a
number of bits to represent system values is carefully chosen gigabit Ethernet connection.
as shown in the simulations. This format will be considered At the transmitter side, the data symbols and the preamble
in the testbed discussed in the following sections. are generated by a host computer using Matlab, which results
0
10 in Nt frames of baseband I/Q samples (Figure 6a). The
4 × 4 SM, Turbo code, Rayleigh
preamble consists of Nt = 2 training symbols of length
4-QAM 16-QAM 64-QAM N + CP designed for time synchronization and channel
−1 Rc = 1/2 Rc = 1/2 Rc = 3/4
10
estimation. The synchronization sequence is generated from
a frequency domain Zadoff-Chu sequence. The data consists
−2
10
of Nsymb = 12 OFDM symbols. The digital baseband I/Q
samples at up to 40 Msps are converted into analog signals
BER

and then up-converted into RF signals of carrier frequency

−3
10 fc = 2.484 GHz. Subsequently, the signal is transmitted in
STS-SD, Float burst mode or in continuous mode over real-time channel
−4
LC-K-Best, Float environment.
10
Fixed-Dist(5,7) WARP
1Gbps
Fixed-Dist(5,9)
RF FPGA Ethernet
−5
ܰ௧
10
−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10

RF
Eb /N0 [dB]
Fig. 3: BER performance of fixed-point LC-K-Best based receiver for a 4 × 4 Transmitter
MIMO system on Rayleigh channel, Iout = 4, Iin = 2, Turbo decoder: Receiver
ܰ௥
Rc = 1/2 (4-QAM, 16-QAM), Rc = 3/4 (64-QAM) and Kb = 2, 048. (a) host PC and WARP
host PC
0
10 Digital BB Analog BB RF signal
I/Q Modulator
ETU , fd = 300Hz, N = 1024 DAC I/Q BB-LP RF Gain
Transmitter Filter PA
4-QAM 16-QAM 12-bits
64-QAM Fixed
40 Msps ̴ܰ‫ݐ‬ൌʹ
−1 Rc = 1/2 Rc = 3/4 Float LO
10 synchronization 2,4 GHz
STS-SD Digital BB Analog RF signal
I/Q BB Gain BB I/Q RF Gain
ADC BB-LP RF-BP
Receiver LNA
12-bits Filter Filter ̴ܰ‫ݎ‬ൌʹ
−2
10 Mixer
ADC BB: Baseband RF: Radio-Frequency
RSSI LO: Local Oscillator PA: Power Amplifier
10-bits
BER

LP: Low Pass LNA: Low Noise Amplifier

BP: Band Pass RSSI: Received Signal Strength Indicator
−3
10 (b) Detailed block diagram
Fig. 5: System setup with Nt = Nr = 2: (a) host PC and WARP, and (b)
Detailed block diagram.
−4
10 šͳ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ Ͳ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ ‫ڮ‬ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ Ͳ
šʹ Ͳ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ ‫ڮ‬ ‫ܲܥ‬ ܰ Ͳ
Preamble (SYN, CE) Data  Dummy
ʹሺ‫ ܲܥ‬൅ ܰሻ ܰ௦௬௠௕ ሺ‫ ܲܥ‬൅ ܰሻ bits
−5 (a) Frame Structure
10 Tx 1 1
0 5 10 15 ܶ௙௥௔௠௘ ൌ ͵ͺ͸ǤͶߤ‫ݏ‬
0.5
Amplitude

Eb /N0 [dB]
Data
Fig. 4: BER performance of fixed-point LC-K-Best based receiver for a 4 × 4
0
-0.5
MIMO system on ETU channel, Iout = 4, Iin = 2, Turbo decoder: Rc = Preamble Dummy bits
-1
1/2 (4-QAM,16-QAM), Rc = 3/4 (64-QAM) and Kb = 2, 048. 0 0.0002 0.0004 0.0006 0.0008 Time0.00
(s)
Tx 2 1
ܶ௙௥௔௠௘ ൌ ͵ͺ͸ǤͶߤ‫ݏ‬
VI. T ESTBED FOR MIMO-OFDM SYSTEM IN REAL - TIME 0.5
Amplitude

0 Data
ENVIRONMENT -0.5
-1 Preamble Dummy bits
This section presents a testbed for the MIMO-OFDM sys- 0 0.0002 0.0004 0.0006 0.0008 Time (s)
0.001
(b) Time signals
tem using WARP platform [10]. Such a testbed allows to Fig. 6: Transmitted signals: (a) Frame structure, (b) Time signals.
take into considerations more real conditions such as channel At the receiver side, a superposition of the transmitted signal
estimation, synchronization and RF impairments. We first is received. The received RF signals are down-converted into
describe our system setup. The results of measurements are the analog baseband I/Q signals. AGC is used to adjust the
then presented. gain of the receive antennas and optimally exploit the dynamic
A. System setup range of the digital baseband signals. A 12-bits ADC samples
In our system setup, we consider without loss of generality a the basedband I and Q analog signals. This format of 12-bits is
2 × 2 MIMO-OFDM system with one WARP card as depicted compatible with the fixed-point format presented in section IV.
in Figure 5a. The testbed can be extended to 4 × 4 system by Then, the digital signal is passed to a host computer for post-
using more WARP cards. The block diagram of the transmitter processing using Matlab. The parameters used for the testbed
and the receiver including the RF components is illustrated in are listed in Table III.
more details in Figure 5b. In the testbed, the signal processing We note that the receiver requires synchronization (both
and the communication algorithms are performed offline. The in time and frequency) and channel estimation before the
 2016 23rd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT)

TABLE III: System Setup Parameters (2 × 2 MIMO system).

in the case of 4-QAM and 16-QAM with turbo decoder.
Number of sub-carriers N (Nc ) 1024 (600 used) samples
Cyclic Prefix (CP) 80 samples The number in the parenthesis (Iout , Iin ) corresponds to the
Number of OFDM symbol Nsymb = 12 number of outer and inner iterations, respectively. We can
Sampling frequency fe 40 MHz see that (4,2) configuration achieves the lowest BER. This
Carrier frequency fc 2.484 GHz
actual measurements validate the simulation results obtained
ADC/DAC 12 bits , 40 Msps
Preamble duration (samples) Nt (CP + N ) = 2(1024 + 80) previously and enable us to test the performance of the
proposed iterative receiver in real environments.
detection of the transmitted signals. In our case, we use the TABLE IV: BER of the iterative receiver with turbo decoder for 2 × 2 MIMO
same local oscillator in both the transmitter and the receiver system with 4-QAM, 16-QAM, (Iout , Iin ).
sides. The frequency carrier offset is zero. As a consequence, 4-QAM
(4,2) (3,2) (2,2) (1,2) (1,8)
the time synchronization can be simply performed at each
BER 5.8 × 10−4 4.2 × 10−3 4 × 10−3 1.5 × 10−2 1.4 × 10−2
antenna by cross-correlating its received sequence with the SNR [dB] 9.71 9.13 9.21 9.0 9.0
known training sequence. The channel estimation is then 16-QAM
performed using least square (LS) principle which consists (4,2) (3,2) (2,2) (1,2) (1,8)
to divide the ith received symbol at k th pilot position (yi,k ) BER 0.01 0.029 0.06 0.027 0.021
by the known pilot at j th transmit antenna (sj,k ):
SNR [dB] 13.41 13.14 12.65 13.15 13.48

yi,k VII. C ONCLUSION

ĥLS
ij,k = , k = 0, ..., Np − 1. (7)
sj,k In this paper, we presented some issues encountered by
The training sequences transmitted by different antennas are the receiver in practical realization of MIMO-OFDM systems.
orthogonal in time to avoid interference between antennas, as First, we have presented an efficient fixed-point representa-
illustrated in Figure 6. tion of the iterative receiver based on K-Best decoder. The
performance of fixed-point receiver has been compared with
B. Testbed results
floating-point performance using different modulation orders
In this section, we carry out simulations and test measure-
and channel models. Simulation results show that fixed-point
ments to demonstrate the performance of the proposed iterative
representation achieves similar performance as floating-point
receiver in real-time conditions with different constellations
system. We have then introduced a testbed using WARP
and channel coding schemes.
platform which allows to validate theoretical assumptions and
The transmitted signals are captured by an oscilloscope as
allows also to validate the feasibility of the iterative receiver
shown in Figure 6b. The frame duration Tf rame without the
in real environments.
dummy bits is equal to 386.4 μs. This duration corresponds
to the product of the number of samples 14 ∗ (N + CP ) R EFERENCES
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