Performance Optimization of Successive Cancellation Devices

Successive cancellation is a well known technique to improve the bit-error rate of multiuser detection algorithms. Its performance gain is highly dependent on the cancellation order of the users. A popular approach is, to order the detection and cancellation dependent on the received energy of each user, or more sophisticated, the average error probability. However, this is not necessarily optimal. In this paper, new ordering methods, based on the instantaneous error probabilities within each symbol period are proposed, to improve the performance of successive cancellation detectors.