Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is a wellknown technique for mitigating interference. For multiple-layer reception, hard-decision SIC with perfect per-layer rate control has been proven to be a capacity-achieving scheme. In practice, however, due to imperfect rate control and signaling constraints, there is a potential for certain variants of SIC techniques to achieve better performance than the conventional harddecision SIC approach. In this paper, the benefits of various SIC techniques are studied. We show that a soft SIC scheme that passes information iteratively between equalizer, demodulator, and decoder enhances MIMO reception in downlink LTE.

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