MultiSphere: Massively Parallel Tree Search for Large Sphere Decoders

This work introduces MultiSphere, a method to massively parallelize the tree search of large sphere decoders in a nearly-independent manner, without compromising their maximum-likelihood performance, and by keeping the overall processing complexity at the levels of highly-optimized sequential sphere decoders. MultiSphere employs a novel sphere decoder tree partitioning which can adjust to the transmission channel with a small latency overhead. It also utilizes a new method to distribute nodes to parallel sphere decoders and a new tree traversal and enumeration strategy which minimize redundant computations despite the nearly-independent parallel processing of the subtrees. For an 8 x 8 MIMO spatially multiplexed system with 16-QAM modulation and 32 processing elements MultiSphere can achieve a latency reduction of more than an order of magnitude, approaching the processing latency of linear detection methods, while its overall complexity can be even smaller than the complexity of well-known sequential sphere decoders. For 8x8 MIMO systems, MultiSphere's sphere decoder tree partitioning method can achieve the processing latency of other partitioning schemes by using half of the processing elements. In addition, it is shown that for a multi-carrier system with 64 subcarriers, when performing sequential detection across subcarriers and using MultiSphere with 8 processing elements to parallelize detection, a smaller processing latency is achieved than when parallelizing the detection process by using a single processing element per subcarrier (64 in total).