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The conventional K-best sphere decoder (KSD) keeps the best K nodes at each level of the search tree. In addition to retaining the best K nodes, we also consider all the nodes whose costs are within a certain margin of the cost of the Kth best node. The resulting algorithm is called improved K-best sphere decoder (IKSD). Three IKSD variants are considered in this letter, which are fixed threshold, normalized threshold and adaptive threshold IKSD. The proposed IKSD requires a smaller K (indicating lower complexity) while still achieving a better and near optimal performance compared to the conventional KSD. These gains are confirmed by the simulation results. For example, for the fixed threshold IKSD in a 4 x 4 16-QAM multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, with K=2, it achieves the same performance as the conventional KSD (K=16), yielding about 80% complexity savings. For coded MIMO systems, the …