On the Limitations of the Naive Lattice Decoding

In this paper, the inherent drawbacks of the naive lattice decoding (NLD) for MIMO fading systems is investigated. We show that using the NLD for MIMO systems has considerable deficiencies in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. Unlike the case of maximum-likelihood decoding, in this case, even the perfect lattice space-time codes which have the nonvanishing determinant property cannot achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. Indeed, we show that in the case of NLD, when we fix the underlying lattice, all the codes based on full-rate lattices have the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as V-BLAST. Also, we derive a lower bound on the symbol error probability of the NLD for the fixed-rate MIMO systems (with equal numbers of receive and transmit antennas). This bound shows that asymptotically, the NLD has an unbounded loss in terms of the required SNR, compared to the maximum likelihood decoding.