Full Diversity Unitary Precoded Integer-Forcing

We consider a point-to-point flat-fading MIMO channel with channel state information known both at transmitter and receiver. At the transmitter side, a lattice coding scheme is employed at each antenna to map information symbols to independent lattice codewords drawn from the same codebook. Each lattice codeword is then multiplied by a unitary precoding matrix P and sent through the channel. At the receiver side, an integer-forcing (IF) linear receiver is employed. We denote this scheme as unitary precoded integer-forcing (UPIF). We show that UPIF can achieve full-diversity under a constraint based on the shortest vector of a lattice generated by the precoding matrix P. This constraint and a simpler version of that provide design criteria for two types of full-diversity UPIF. Type I uses a unitary precoder that adapts at each channel realization. Type II uses a unitary precoder, which remains fixed for all channel realizations. We then verify our results by computer simulations in 2×2, and 4×4 MIMO using different QAM constellations. We finally show that the proposed Type II UPIF outperform the MIMO precoding X-codes at high data rates.