Zero forcing based sphere decoder for generalized spatial modulation systems

To reduce the number of radio frequency (RF) chains in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, generalized spatial modulation (GSM) techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a zero‐forcing (ZF)‐based detector, which performs an initial pruning of the search tree that will be considered as the initial condition in a sphere decoding (SD) algorithm. The proposed method significantly reduces the computational complexity of GSM systems while achieving a near maximum likelihood (ML) performance. We analyze the performance of the proposed method and provide an analytic performance difference between the proposed method and the ML detector. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is very close to that of the ML detector, while achieving a significant computational complexity reduction in comparison with the conventional SD method, in terms of the number of visited nodes. We also present some simulations to assess the accuracy of our theoretical results.