Codeword metric calculation scheme for outer code in overloaded MIMO-OFDM system

This paper presents a codeword metric calculation scheme for two step joint decoding of block coded signals in overloaded multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. A two step joint decoding scheme has been proposed for the complexity reduction as compared to joint maximum likelihood decoding in overloaded MIMO systems. Outer codes are widely used in wireless LANs such as IEEE802.11n. However, the two step joint decoding has not been combined with an outer code. In the first step of the two step joint decoding candidate codewords for metric calculation in the second step are selected. The selection of the candidate codewords in the inner block code may not always be able to provide the metric of a binary coded symbol for the outer code. Moreover, a bit flipping based codeword selection scheme in the two step joint decoding may not always provide the second best candidate codeword. Thus, in the proposed scheme the metric of the binary coded symbol calculated in the first step is reused in the second step of two step joint decoding. It is shown that the two step joint decoding with the proposed metric calculation scheme achieves better performance than that of the joint decoding with the bit flipping based codeword calculation scheme and reduces the complexity by about 0.013 for 4 signal streams with the cost of bit error rate degradation within 0.5 dB.