Multimode Integer-Forcing Receivers for Block Fading Channels

Abstract

Integer-forcing (IF) receivers are a class of linear multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receivers to achieve near-optimal performance under quasi-static channels, with almost the same complexity as that of conventional linear receivers. Instead of trying to recover the transmitted messages directly, an IF receiver recovers their integer-linear combinations corresponding to a chosen integer-valued effective channel matrix, and then obtains them. Recently, the IF strategy has been extended to a block fading scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel IF receiver for block fading channels, called a multimode IF (M-IF) receiver. Unlike conventional IF receivers, the proposed M-IF receiver employs several integer-valued effective channel matrices for IF decoding. We also propose an efficient search algorithm for selecting such matrices with the aid of Gaussian elimination. We then show that for any channel realizations, the proposed M-IF receiver has better performance in terms of the effective noise variance than conventional IF receivers. Simulation results demonstrate that it works really well in various environments.