Universal lattice decoding: a review and some recent results

The idea of formulating the detection of a lattice-type modulation transmitted over a linear channel as the so-called universal lattice decoding problem dates back to at least the early 1990s. The principle of universal lattice decoding can trace its roots back to the theory developed for solving the shortest/closest lattice vector problem. In this paper, such a principle and its applications in communications are reviewed. In addition, it will be shown that with some lattice preprocessing steps, impressive performance improvement and/or complexity reduction of some well-known detectors (e.g. ZF, DFE, and VBLAST) can be achieved.