Performance Evaluation of List Sphere Detector

A list sphere detector can use a smaller list than commonly believed by employing an appropriate soft output approximation method. Its effect on the "quality" of detector's soft output value is evaluated by measuringmutual information under ergodic channel. The result shows a length 40 list is adequate for a 4 × 4 16QAM MIMO system without system-level iteration. For the ergodic channel, the gain of a sphere detector over the linear MMSE detector is dependent on channel coding rate, which answers an important question when sphere detector should be used in system level design. All these theoretical results are then verified by Monte Carlo simulation.