List Sequential MIMO Detection:
Noise Bias Term and Partial Path Augmentation
Steffen Bittner, Ernesto Zimmermann, Wolfgang Rave and Gerhard Fettweis
Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications Systems
Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany
Email: bittner@ifn.et.tu-dresden.de
Abstract— Near-capacity performance can be achieved in
multiple-antenna systems by using a list sequential (LISS) de-
tector for iterative equalization. Path augmentation is known to
increase the performance of this detector, while a so-called bias
term has been used to reduce its computational complexity, in
applications other than MIMO detection.
In this work, we extend the LISS MIMO detector [1] to
incorporate different implementations of the bias term. We show
that following the traditional approach of using an auxiliary stack
for this purpose leads to a strong narrowing of the search tree, but
also to a significant performance degradation, due to a reduced
quality of the detector soft output. We therefore propose to use a
so-called noise bias term instead, which can be implemented with
negligible effort, significantly reduces the size of the search tree,
but allows for almost retaining detector performance. Finally, we
demonstrate that the extension of only a small fraction of the
incomplete stack entries is sufficient to leverage the full gains of
path augmentation, thus enabling further substantial savings in
computational complexity.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Radio frequency spectrum is a scarce resource and thus has
to be used as efficiently as possible to satisfy the demands of
modern data services. To achieve this high spectral efficiency,
multiple antennas can be used at transmitter and receiver
to spatially multiplex several parallel data streams into the
same time-frequency bin. A big challenge in this context
is the correct separation of the transmitted signals at the
receiver. Recently, the field of iterative MIMO equalization
based on the serial concatenation of an inner MIMO detector
and an outer channel decoder has received a lot of attention.
Two representatives of this approach are list sphere [4] and
list sequential (LISS) [1] detection. Both schemes are able
to approach the capacity limit of the MIMO channel while
avoiding the prohibitive complexity of a full APP detector.
The LISS detector is a derivation of the basic stack algo-
rithm. A sorted list is filled with paths of different lengths
resulting from a tree search over possibly transmitted vector
signals. The detection procedure is stopped as soon as a
predefined number of full length paths (candidates) is found.
Adjusting the stack size allows to trade-off detector perfor-
mance against implementation simplicity. There are two main
drawbacks of (conventional) LISS detection: firstly, the stack
usually contains a large number of incomplete paths which
are not considered in the calculation of soft outputs and thus
constitute a waste of resources. Secondly, shorter paths are
privileged in the extension process. The search tree thus grows
very fast in width, resulting in high detection complexity.
The problem of shortened paths can be resolved by using
soft bits to extend all incomplete stack entries to full length
[1]. Very good performance can then be achieved even when
the stack contains only a low number of full length paths
after the tree search. However, the complexity of this path
augmentation can still be significant. In this paper we therefore
propose to extend only a small fraction of the shortened paths
– the ones with the best path metrics – and show that similar
performance gains can be achieved. The issue of different
path lengths during the tree search has not been considered in
previous work on LISS MIMO detection. A so-called bias term
can be used to tackle this problem. By penalizing short paths, it
prevents the tree from growing too fast in width, thus speeding
up the search. One possible solution is to use an additional
auxiliary stack for this purpose [3]. Although this variant leads
to an almost perfect estimation of the bias term, the required
effort in terms of computational complexity and additional
memory is prohibitively high. In this paper, we propose to
approximate the bias term by the average accumulated noise
energy over the receive antennas. This easily implementable
noise term requires practically no implementation effort and
provides an even better performance-complexity trade-off than
the original bias term.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. In
Section II we describe the system model and the principles of
iterative equalization. Section III introduces the basics of list
sequential (LISS) detection investigated in detail in this paper.
We also present different possibilities for bias term calculation
and path augmentation. In Section IV we show results on the
performance and complexity of the different LISS detector
implementations investigated in this paper. We conclude the
paper with a summary of our findings in Section V.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
A. MIMO-Model
We consider a MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) sys-
tem with T x transmit and Rx receive antennas as depicted
in Figure 1. Let u be a vector of information bits which are
encoded by the outer encoder and interleaved. The resulting
code bit stream is separated into blocks x containing T x·N in-
dependent binary digits. Here, N represents the number of bits
per symbol and therefore allows to separate between M = 2N
different constellation points. Each block x = (x1 , · · · , xT x )T of appropriate size and structure), the joint probabilities can
consists of T x binary vectors xt = (xt1 , · · · , xtN ) of N be split into products. The L-value computation can now be
bits. As part of the transmission process, every single block rewritten as:
is mapped onto a T x × 1 complex vector of symbols P
x∈Xtn,+1 p(y|x) · P [x]/p(y)
s = (s1 , · · · , sT x )T whose components are taken from some L(xtn |y) = ln P (3)
complex constellation C (e.g. 16-quadrature amplitude mod- x∈Xtn,−1 p(y|x) · P [x]/p(y)

ulation (QAM)). These components are obtained using the where Xtn,±1 is the set of 2T x·N −1 bit blocks x with
mapping function st = map(xt ), t = 1, · · · , T x (e.g., Gray xtn = ±1. The MIMO channel introduces interference among
mapping). the transmitted signals at the receiver. The conditioned proba-
Binary Outer Constellation
bility density in (3) is therefore given by the complex Gaussian
u c x
Source Encoder Mapper
distribution
s
Rate R Interleaver ...  
H 1 1 2
... p(y|x) = exp − ky − Hsk . (4)
Hard Decision
AWGN n (πN0 )Rx N0
y

Binary
Sink
SISO
Decoder
LA,Dec
-1
LE,Det
LE,Dec
Fig. 1. Transmission model with outer PCC encoder, MIMO channel and
iterative receiver (soft SIC MIMO detector and SISO decoder).
The average transmission energy is equal to E[ksk2 ] = Es ,
with each component obeying the energy constraint of Es /T x.
Let y be a vector of received symbols according to
y = Hs + n
where H is a dimension Rx × T x MIMO channel matrix
perfectly known at the receiver. Each entry of the channel
matrix is an independent realisation of a complex Gaussian
random process with zero mean and variance 1/2 per real di-
mension. The noise vector n consists of mutually independent
zero-mean circularly symmetric complex Gaussian random
y−Hs
2 +ln Y Y P [x ]−ln p(y)
variables, each with variance N0 /2 per real dimension.
tn
B. Iterative MIMO Equalization
y −Hs
2 +ln Y Y P [x ]−ln p(y) .
As receiver architecture we consider the serial concatenation
tn
of an inner MIMO detector and an outer channel decoder.
Both detector and decoder are able to accept and generate soft
information, which can be exchanged in an iterative fashion.
The detector uses the received signal, the channel state infor-
mation and the a-priori information provided by the decoder to
generate new (extrinsic) information. The decoder exploits the
correlation among different bits of the codeword (code bits),
which are introduced by the channel code, to generate extrinsic
information about the information bits as well as about the
code bits. The latter information is interleaved and fed back
to the detector. The MIMO detector can hence employ the
provided a-priori information to further improve its soft output.
For the soft information representation we use the conven-
tion of the so called log-likelihood values (L-values), see [2]
for details. The L-value of a certain bit xtn conditioned on the
received signal y is defined as:
P [xtn = +1|y]
L(xtn |y) := ln . (2)
P [xtn = −1|y]
Using Bayes’ theorem under the assumption of mutually inde-
pendent bits xtn (which is justified by the use of an interleaver
MIMO
Detector
For the L-value computation only the exponential term is
relevant – the constant scaling factor 1/(πN0 )Rx cancels out
LA,Det and can be omitted. The second term in (3) represents the a-
priori knowledge fed into the detector from the outer decoder,
whereas the third (bias) term p(y) takes the influence of the
different path lengths during the tree search into account. Note
that this bias term effectively cancels itself out in the L-value
computation, as only full length paths are considered there. Its
only purpose is to speed up the tree search as will be explained
later in Section III.
(1) To evaluate the numerator and denominator in (3) it is often
convenient to apply the so called ”max-Log” approximation
in order to speed up computation at the expense of some
performance degradation [6]. The computation of the detector
L-value can hence be approximated as a difference of two
max-operations:
 
1
Tx N
L(xtn |y) ≈ max −
x∈Xtn ,+1 N0 t=1 n=1
 
1
Tx N
− max −
x∈Xtn ,−1 N0
t=1 n=1
(5)
As outlined in the introduction, equation (5) can be imple-
mented by a number of different MIMO detection strategies.
In our work, we concentrated on the list sequential approach,
whose specifics are discussed in the following section.
III. S EQUENTIAL D ETECTION
A. Tree Search
Evaluating the two max-operations in equation (5) by a
brute-force approach is an intractable task which grows ex-
ponentially with the number of transmit antennas and the
modulation size. However, only a few hypotheses x ∈ Xtn , ±1
actually maximise each of the respective terms. We call these
hypotheses candidates and restrict our search to a subset list
L ⊂ X. This list should on the one hand include only a
fraction of elements from X but on the other hand be large
enough to allow approaching the true detector L-value as
closely as possible, such that any performance degradation of
the receiver can be avoided. One effective scheme enabling
 the construction of such a subset list is the stack algorithm, B. Bias Term Calculation
of which the List-Sequential (LISS) Detector introduced in During the tree search, the stack of the LISS detector
[1] is a derivative. The LISS detector performs a tree search, contains paths of different lengths. Longer paths usually
maintaining a list of paths of different lengths which are sorted have worse metrics, due to the higher accumulated Euclidean
according to their metrics. distances, and hence tend to be sorted to the bottom of the
For systems with an equal number of transmit and receive stack. As a result, the width of the search tree grows very
antennas, the computation of the squared Euclidian distance fast, resulting in high detection complexity. The so-called bias
in (5) can be written as: term ln p(y) in (7) enables to efficiently tackle this problem
by appropriate adjustment of the path metrics. For a path of
ky − Hsk2 = kH(s − ŝZF )k2 (6)
length t (i.e., spanning antennas 1 through t), it is defined as:
where ŝZF = (HH H)−1 HH y is the unconstrained ML X
ln p(y1t ) = ln p(y|xi ) · P [xi ]
estimate of s (also known as the Zero-Forcing solution), which
xi ∈It
acts as the starting point of our search. During the tree search X
we always extend the path with the best metric which has not = ln eln p(y|xi )+ln P [xi ] . (9)
yet reached full length, by its M successors. The search ends xi ∈It

after we obtained a predefined number of fully extended paths. where It indicates the set of all possible signal combinations
(cf. Figure 2 for an illustration of such a BPSK search tree, for the considered path depth t. The calculation of the correct
where ”×” indicates the received symbol per antenna and ”•” bias term is thus as complex as the whole soft output detection
represents the BPSK constellation points as well as the soft problem itself. In [3] it is therefore suggested to calculate an
modulated constellation points in case of augmented paths.) approximate bias term by using an additional auxiliary stack
which contains only an appropriate subset of I. However, the
LA (x11 ) = −5 LA (x21 ) = +2.2 LA (x31 ) = −1.1 increase in complexity and the additional memory require-
x11 = +1 x̄21 = +0.8 x̄31 = −0.5 ments eat up a substantial part of the savings obtained by
introducing this version of the bias term.
PSfrag replacements We therefore take a different approach that directly ad-
dresses the main problem: the larger accumulated Euclidean
x31 = +1
distance in the metric of long paths. We propose to approxi-
x21 = +1 mate the bias term by the average accumulated noise energy
x31 = −1 over the receive antennas. Assuming perfect detection of the
x11 = −1
transmitted signal, ŝ = s, the squared Euclidian distance d2M L
is equal to the squared norm of the noise vector n:
x21 = −1 x̄31 = −0.5
d2M L = ky − Hŝk2 = kH(s − ŝ) + nk2 = knk2
N0
Fig. 2. Search tree for a 3 × 3 MIMO system using BPSK transmission. ∼ · χ22Rx . (10)
Dashed lines indicate augmented paths. 2
which is proportional to a weighted N20 chi-square ran-
As a prerequisite for evaluating (5) by a tree search algo- dom variable with 2Rx degrees of freedom. Thus,
rithm, we have to decompose the channel matrix H to obtain E{d2M L } = Rx · N0 and in view of the definition of the path
a matrix of upper triangular structure. Since it is obviously metric increment (7) it becomes evident that, even in the case
also advantageous to detect reliably received signals first, we of perfect detection, the path metric is decremented by 1
use the sorted QR decomposition (ZF-SQRD) introduced in per detected antenna, on average. We therefore propose to
[7] for this purpose. compensate this effect by incrementing the path metric by
The upper triangular structure of R allows for defining a 1 per detected antenna. The introduction of this noise term
set of per-antenna metric increments, where each increment can be expected to yield a narrower search tree and hence a
depends only on the current and previously detected symbols: complexity reduction at practically zero implementation effort.
Tx 2 N C. Path Augmentation
1 X X
Λt = − rt,j (sj − ŝZFj ) + ln P [xtn ] − ln p(yt ) The information lying in the incomplete entries of the stack
N0 j=t
n=1
(7) can be used to further improve the L-values. By extending
where the term ln p(yt ) represents the bias increment at the shortened paths to full length, each list vector (horizontal
antenna t. Using these metric increments, the overall path stack entry) can be written as:
metric can now be calculated as: x̃l = (x̃1 , x̃2 , · · · , x̃N ·Hl , x̃N ·Hl +1 , · · · , x̃N ·T x )T
 X 1   X 1  := (x1 , x2 , · · · , xN ·Hl , x̄N ·Hl +1 , · · · , x̄N ·T x )T .(11)
L(xtn |y) ≈ max Λt − max Λt .
x∈Xtn ,+1
t=T x
x∈Xtn ,−1
t=T x
where Hl indicates the number of perfectly known (in terms
(8) of distance computations) and hard decided bit values of the
lth list vector. Early proposals for such a path augmentation IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
[5] suggested the use of a random tail. However, better The performance of the LISS detector using different ap-
performance can be achieved by extending the shortened paths proaches for noise term calculation and path augmentation was
using soft bits generated from available a-priori knowledge [1], tested by simulating a 4 × 4 MIMO system, with parameters
that is:   selected equivalent to the setup in [4]. We assumed the
LA (xtn )
x̄tn = tanh . (12) receiver to know the channel perfectly and the channel gains
2
to remain constant over the transmission of one vector but
An example for such a path augmentation is given in change statistically independent from one vector to another.
Figure 2. The expected metric increment Λ̄t for t = H + As channel code we used a rate R = 1/2 parallel concate-
1, · · · , T x can be derived as the average
PM over all possible nated G = [7R , 5] turbo code, where 7 indicates the memory
metric increments Λ̄t = E[Λt ] = ln m=1 exp(Λtm ). Again, two feedback polynomial G(D) = 1 + D + D2 and 5 the
the max-log approximation is employed to simplify the calcu- memory two feedforward polynomial G(D) = 1 + D2 . The
lation: decoder performed 8 internal turbo decoding iterations. The
 interleaver size was set to 9216 bits. Moreover, we performed
1 r (s − ŝ ) + X r (s̃ − ŝ
2
Tx

Λ̄t ≈ max − t,t tm ZFt t,j j ZFj )
4 detector-decoder iterations.
∀ m N0 j=t+1

X
N  0
10
··· + ln P [xnm ] − ln p(yt )
n=1 8 candidates

(13) −1
10

where the (hard/soft) symbols s̃l are obtained by (hard/soft)

mapping of x̃l . The bit probabilities are equal to No path augm.
−2
10 No bias
1 + xtn · x̃tn BER →
P [xtn = ±1] = . (14)
2 Path augm. No path augm.
Aux. stack bias Noise bias
For the first iteration, however, no a-priori information is −3
10

available. We therefore base the path augmentation on the ZF Full search

Path augm. 1/3 path augm.
solution ŝZF [1]. The corresponding metric increment can be −4
No bias Noise bias
10
written as:
Tx 2
1 X
Λt = − r (s
t,j j − ŝZFj − ln p(yt )
) (15)
N0 2 2.5 3 3.5
Eb/N0 [dB] →
4 4.5 5
j=H
After the augmentation we have a complete working stack
and compute the L-value by soft weighting of the stack entries Fig. 3. Performance results of a QPSK LISS receiver after 4 Detector-
Λ(l) as proposed in [3]: Decoder-Iterations with and without path augmentation and different types of

   
1 + x̃tn 1 − x̃tn
L(xtn |y) ≈ max Λ(l)+ln −max Λ(l)+ln . Figure 3 shows the result for QPSK transmission. As refer-
∀l 2 ∀l 2
This approach makes it possible to evaluate each max-
operation over all entries in the working stack, since the ln(·)
part suppresses all contributions from negative bits in the first
and all contribution from positive bits in the second term, by
adding −∞.
From the outline of the path augmentation procedure it
becomes evident that the expected increase in performance
may come at a substantial cost in terms of implementation
effort, since a very high number of additional metric in-
crements have to be calculated and far more stack entries
have to be considered in the L-value computation (remember
that the stack size is usually far larger than the number of
full length candidates). One key question is hence whether
it is really necessary to augment all incomplete paths in the
stack. Motivated by the typical max-Log approximation, an
alternative way is to sort the shortened paths according to their
metric and use only a small fraction for path augmentation.
The remaining incomplete paths are deleted from the stack.
bias approximations.
ence and upper performance bound, we plotted results for full
APP detection (running the LISS with 28 = 256 candidates).
The waterfall region for this brute-force approach is around
2.5dB. For all further investigations with QPSK transmission,
we stopped the LISS algorithm after finding 8 full length
candidates, to assess the performance of a detector having
acceptable complexity. If we base our L-value computation
solely on these 8 full length candidates, we cannot guarantee
the stack to contain a hypothesis (bit is +1) and counter-
hypothesis (bit is −1) for each possible bit position. To
avoid infinite L-values, it is therefore necessary to clip the
corresponding soft outputs (we chose a clipping level of ±4).
A performance degradation of roughly 2dB is incurred in this
setup of the LISS detector. Applying path augmentation of
the incomplete stack entries improves performance by almost
1.5dB – the waterfall region is now around 3.2dB. As stated
before, the main problem of this strategy is that we have a
rather high number of paths that need to be extended and
therefore a high computational complexity.
 0
10
To reduce the stack size we therefore have to include the 1/3 augmented
1/10 augmented
bias term during the tree search. For the bias term based 1/20 augmented
1 Path augmented
on the auxiliary stack, we used a stack size of 256 and −1
10

always extended all nodes as proposed in [3]. The simulation

results in Figure 3 show that this very accurate estimation of −2
10
ln p(y) leads to a significant performance degradation. The

BER →
explanation for this result is that the search tree is narrowed
−3
“too much” (cf. the results in Figure 4). Even extending 10

all incomplete paths does not yield sufficient information to

calculate accurate soft outputs for certain bit values. The −4
10
second option for bias term calculation is the proposed noise
term. Combined with a partial path augmentation of only 1/3
of all incomplete paths, this approach leads only to a slight 6 6.2 6.4 6.6 6.8 7 7.2 7.4 7.6 7.8
E /N [dB] →
b 0
performance degradation of around 0.2 dB. It is obviously a
far more attractive approach. Without path augmentation, using Fig. 5. Bit error rate for a 16-QAM system with 96 full length candidates
the bias term even results in a small performance improvement and different numbers of path augmentations.
which appears to be a beneficial side-effect of the more
directed search.
setup is presented in Figure 6. The single path augmentation
13
8 Cand./path−augm. curve is also plotted for reference. This curve approaches
8 Cand./Aux+path−augm.
12 8 Cand./Noise+path−augm. T x − 1 = 3 augmentations with increasing SNR. However,
11
using the 1/20 partial path augmentation we could reduce the
augmentation complexity from 300 augmented nodes to 15
10
– a dramatic reduction in complexity without any significant
No. of Nodes →

9 loss in performance. We thus consider a combination of

8
the noise term and partial path augmentation as the most
promising approach in LISS MIMO detection, in terms of the
7
performance-complexity trade-off.
6
140
1/3 augmented
5 1/10 augmented
1/20 augmented
120
1 Path augmented
4
2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5
No. of Path augmentations →

Eb/N0 [dB] →
100

Fig. 4. Number of extended nodes during the tree search, corresponding to 80

Figure 3.
60
The influence of the different bias terms on the tree search,
in terms of the number of extended nodes, is depicted in 40

Figure 4. Interestingly, for the auxiliary stack version this

figure is almost independent of the SNR, which would be
advantageous for a real-time implementation of the LISS
algorithm. However, the observed performance degradation
is not justifiable. Using the noise term, we could achieve a
complexity reduction of more than 12%.
To assess the potential complexity reduction by using only
partial path augmentation, we chose a scenario of 16-QAM
transmission using 96 full length candidates. Figure 5 shows
the performance of the LISS detector using path augmentation
of different fractions of the incomplete stack entries. It is
easily seen that it is sufficient to extend only 1/20 of all
incomplete paths to retain the original performance. Extending
only a single path results in a performance loss of roughly 0.5
dB. Again, we cannot completely forbear from doing the path
augmentation, since we need the soft entries in the stack to
always ensure a reliable counter hypothesis.
The total number of path augmentations for the 16-QAM
20
0
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Eb/N0 [dB] →
Fig. 6. Number of augmented paths, corresponding to Figure 5
A parameter not considered yet is the number of full length
candidates. A performance comparison for a 16-QAM system
is shown in Figure 7. Here one can see the slight performance
loss between a full complexity setup, where we did not use
any bias approximation and augmented all incomplete paths,
and a reduced complexity setup including the noise term and
a partial augmentation of 1/3. With the help of the noise term
we succeeded in speeding up the tree search by more than
20% (compared to 12% for the QPSK case). But we still have
a quite large number of path augmentations, which can be
reduced as show in Figure 5.
 0
10
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the German ministry of
−1
10
research and education within the project Wireless Giga-
bit with advanced multimedia support (WIGWAM) under
−2
10 grant 01 BU 370.
BER →

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−3
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attractive option, speeding up the tree search by more than
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a negligible performance loss and implementation complexity.
Furthermore, we showed that extending only a few incomplete
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other shortened paths from the stack reduces the complexity
of path augmentation drastically without any significant loss in
performance. A combination of the proposed noise term and
partial path augmentation hence offers a very attractive trade-
off between performance and implementation complexity for
list sequential iterative MIMO detection.