Dataset for the paper “Two Decades of MIMO Design Tradeoffs and Reduced-Complexity MIMO Detection in Near-Capacity Systems“. Xu, C., Sugiura, S., Ng, S., Zhang, P., Wang, L., & Hanzo, L. (2017). Two decades of MIMO design tradeoffs and reduced-complexity MIMO detection in near-capacity systems. IEEE Access. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2707182 Abstract: A pair of salient tradeoffs have driven the MIMO systems developments. More explicitly, the early era of MIMO developments was predominantly motivated by the multiplexing-diversity tradeoff between the Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (BLAST) and Space-Time Block Coding (STBC). Later, the Linear Dispersion Code (LDC) concept was introduced to strike a flexible tradeoff. The more recent MIMO system designs were motivated by the performance-complexity tradeoff, where the Spatial Modulation (SM) and Space-Time Shift Keying (STSK) concepts eliminate the problem of Inter-Antenna Interference (IAI) and perform well with the aid of low-complexity linear receivers without imposing a substantial performance loss on generic ML/MAP aided MIMO detection. Against the background of the MIMO design tradeoffs in both uncoded and coded MIMO systems, in this treatise, we offer a comprehensive survey of MIMO detectors ranging from hard-decision to soft-decision. The soft-decision MIMO detectors play a pivotal role in approaching to the full performance potential promised by the MIMO capacity theorem. Having said that, in the near-capacity system design, the soft-decision MIMO detection dominates the total complexity, because all the MIMO signal combinations have to be examined, when both the channel's output signal and the \textit{a priori} LLRs gleaned from the channel decoder are taken into account. Against this background, we provide reduced-complexity design guidelines, which are conceived for a wide-range of soft-decision MIMO detectors. Acknowledgements: The financial support of the European Research Council's Advanced Fellow Grant is gratefully acknowledged. The work of S. Sugiura was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI under Grant Numbers 26709028, 16KK0120.