On The Limitations of The Naive Lattice Decoding

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