In this paper, an adaptive expansion strategy (AES) is proposed for multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) detection in the presence of circular signals. By exploiting channel properties, the AES classifies MIMO channels into three types: excellent, average and deep fading. To avoid unnecessary branch-searching, the AES adopts single expansion (SE), partial expansion (PE) and full expansion (FE) for excellent channels, average channels and deep fading channels, respectively. In the PE, the non-circularity of signal is exploited, and the widely linear processing is extended from non-circular signals to circular signals by I (or Q) component cancellation. An analytical performance analysis is given to quantify the performance improvement. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve quasi-optimal performance with much less complexity (hundreds of flops/symbol are saved) compared with the fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) and the sphere decoder (SD).

We create an efficient statistical pruning (SP) algorithm for fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) by utilizing partial decision feedback detection (i.e., SP-FSD). Simulation results show that SP-FSD not only attains the near-optimal performance, but also achieves much lower complexity than the original FSD and its two lately-developed variants: the simplified FSD (SFSD) and the statistical threshold-based FSD (ST-FSD).