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 2Γ2, and 4Γ4 MIMO using different QAM
constellations. We finally show that the proposed Type II UPIF outperform the
MIMO precoding X-codes at high data rates.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, to appear in IEEE-TW