Integer-forcing architectures: An overview

This short note gives an overview of the concept of integer-forcing architectures for MIMO systems. Such architectures employ a linear receiver structure, i.e., a static linear transform followed by separate single-stream decoders, thus enjoying a significant complexity advantage over joint decoding of all streams. In standard linear receivers, the component single-stream decoders each decode one of the original data streams. In the integer-forcing architecture, each component decoder decodes an integer linear combination of several streams. Finally, these integer linear combinations are inverted to recover the original messages. Integer-forcing architectures can significantly outperform other linear MIMO receivers, including receivers that employ successive interference cancellation.