Impact of Stair and Diagonal Matrices in Iterative Linear Massive MIMO Uplink Detectors for 5G Wireless Networks

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (M-MIMO) systems, a detector based on maximum likelihood (ML) algorithm attains optimum performance, but it exhaustively searches all possible solutions, hence, it has a very high complexity and realization is denied. Linear detectors are an alternative solution because of low complexity and simplicity in implementation. Unfortunately, they culminate in a matrix inversion that increases the computational complexity in high loaded systems. Therefore, several iterative methods have been proposed to approximate or avoid the matrix inversion, such as the Neuamnn series (NS), Newton iterations (NI), successive overrelaxation (SOR), Gauss-Siedel (GS), Jacobi (JA), and Richardson (RI) methods. However, a detector based on iterative methods requires a pre-processing and initialization where good initialization impresses the convergence, the performance, and the complexity. Most of the existing iterative linear detectors are using a diagonal matrix (D) in initialization because the equalization matrix is almost diagonal. This paper studies the impact of utilizing a stair matrix (S) instead of D in initializing the linear M-MIMO uplink (UL) detector. A comparison between iterative linear M-MIMO UL detectors with D and S is presented in performance and computational complexity. Numerical Results show that utilization of S achieves the target performance within few iterations, and, hence, the computational complexity is reduced. A detector based on the GS and S achieved a satisfactory bit-error-rate (BER) with the lowest complexity.