Practical implementation of integer forcing linear receivers in MIMO channels

Integer Forcing (IF) architecture has been recently proposed to design linear receivers in MIMO systems. Research works show the promise of this architecture from a capacity achieving perspective. However, it is not totally understood how to select IF coefficient matrix and if the promised theoretical gain of the resulting receivers is attainable in practical settings. We try in this work to fill the gap between theory and practice: we propose algorithms to select optimal IF receiver parameters that lead to the maximization of the total achievable rate. We propose an implementation of an IF-based MIMO system considering a practical scenario where lattice codes are used. Experimental studies are carried out to evaluate the error rate performance of the proposed algorithms and compare them to traditional linear receivers. Our proposed implementation shows that the theoretical potential of the IF receivers is achievable even with finite-length lattice codes.