Design and analysis of a reduced complexity MRC V-BLAST receiver for massive MIMO

In this paper, we take a proposed low-complexity Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space Time receiver based on maximal ratio combining and further simplify the algorithm by replacing the channel norm ordering by a power based ordering. The receiver operates in an uplink massive multiple-input-multiple-output deployment with distributed single-antenna users and a large base station (BS) array. The novel receiver is compared with other more complex detection schemes such as linear zero forcing. Moreover, an explicit closed form analysis for error probability for both co-located and distributed BSs is provided. It is shown that the error performance of the distributed scenario is well approximated by a modified version of a co-located scenario. The simulation study demonstrates the performance of the proposed scheme and confirms the accuracy of analytical results.