Patent ID: 8345806

Claim:
An apparatus for a receiver in a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) wireless communication system, the apparatus comprising: a radio frequency (RF) processor configured to convert signals, received through multiple antennas, into baseband signals; a channel estimator configured to estimate channel information of the respective antennas by using the received signals; and a signal detector configured to: arrange the baseband signals of the respective antennas based on the channel information; calculate a final cumulative metric between a receive (RX) symbol combination and each of a plurality of final symbol combinations detected by a decision feedback (DF) detection scheme based on a subset of symbol combinations of an n th stage, the final symbol combinations determined at a final stage, wherein a number of stages corresponds to a number of transmission antennas; set a minimum final cumulative metric to a threshold value of the n th stage; select symbols with a final cumulative metric smaller than or equal to the threshold value as candidates at each stage; add all transmittable symbols to a candidate symbol combination of an (n−1) th stage to generate the symbol combinations of the n th stage; calculate a cumulative metric for each symbol combination up to the n th stage; and select the symbol combination with a cumulative metric smaller than or equal to the threshold value calculated using the symbol combinations as the candidate symbol combination of the n th stage, to detect a transmit (TX) signal vector with N number of symbols.