Multi-stage turbo equalization for MIMO systems with hybrid ARQ

A multi-stage turbo equalization scheme based on the bit-level combining (BLC) is proposed for multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems with hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). In the proposed multi-stage turbo equalization scheme, the minimum mean-square-error equalizer at each iteration calculates the extrinsic log-likelihood ratios for the transmitted bits in a subpacket and the subpackets are sequentially replaced at each iteration according to the HARQ rounds of received subpackets. Therefore, a number of iterations are executed for different subpackets received at several HARQ rounds, and the transmitted bits received at the previous HARQ rounds as well as the current HARQ round can be estimated from the combined information up to the current HARQ round. In addition, the proposed multi-stage turbo equalization scheme has the same computational complexity as the conventional bit-level combining based turbo equalization scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed multi-stage turbo equalization scheme outperforms the conventional BLC based turbo equalization scheme for MIMO systems with HARQ.