Methods and devices of packet detection for MIMO systems

A wireless communication device for receiving wireless signals by a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system, comprising:

• a receiver of the MIMO system, the MIMO system comprising a number of transmitting antennas Ntx and a number of receiving antennas Nrx, wherein the number of transmitting antennas Ntx and the number of receiving antennas Nrx are integers greater than or equal to 1;
• a processor, communicatively coupled with the receiver;
• and
• one or more memory banks, communicatively coupled to the processor and storing processor readable codes that, when executed by the processor in conjunction with the receiver, is configured for:
• receiving input data by the receiver, wherein Rx is one of the receiving antennas and STS is one of a plurality of space-time streams received by the receiver, the MIMO system thereby defining a plurality of (Rx, STS) combination pairs, each (Rx, STS) combination pair comprising one of the receiving antennas and one of the plurality of space-time streams;
• performing peak detection by a two-tiered approach including an outer loop and an inner loop to generate a plurality of candidates, wherein the outer loop iterates over the plurality of (Rx, STS) combination pairs, and the inner loop runs peak detection on the input data by one or more correlators for each of the (Rx, STS) combination pairs, and wherein each of the plurality of candidates is composed of detected peaks from correlation outputs corresponding to a respective one of the (Rx, STS) combination pairs;
• and
• deriving a final start of packet (TO) measurement and a final Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) measurement from the plurality of candidates as a final packet detection result.