Low-complexity iterative detection for large-scale multiuser MIMO-OFDM systems using approximate message passing

One of the challenges in the design of large-scale multiuser MIMO-OFDM systems is developing low-complexity detection algorithms. To achieve this goal, we leverage message passing algorithms over the factor graph that represents the multiuser MIMO-OFDM systems and approximate the original discrete messages with continuous Gaussian messages through the use of the minimum Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence criterion. Several signal processing techniques are then proposed to achieve near-optimal performance at low complexity. First, the principle of expectation propagation is employed to compute the approximate Gaussian messages, where the symbol belief is approximated by a Gaussian distribution and then the approximate message is calculated from the Gaussian approximate belief. In addition, the approximate symbol belief can be computed by the a posteriori probabilities fed back from channel decoders, which reduces the complexity dramatically. Second, the first-order approximation of the message is utilized to further simplify the message updating, leading to an algorithm that is equivalent to the AMP algorithm proposed by Donoho et al. Finally, the message updating is further simplified using the central-limit theorem. Compared with the single tree search sphere decoder (STS-SD) and the iterative (turbo) minimum mean-square error based soft interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) in the literature through extensive simulations, the proposed message passing algorithms can achieve a near-optimal performance while the complexity is decreased by tens of times for a 64 64 MIMO system. In addition, it is shown that the proposed message passing algorithms exhibit desirable tradeoffs between performance and complexity for a low-dimensional MIMO system.