  The work identifies the first general, explicit, and non-random MIMO
encoder-decoder structures that guarantee optimality with respect to the
diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), without employing a computationally
expensive maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver. Specifically, the work establishes
the DMT optimality of a class of regularized lattice decoders, and more
importantly the DMT optimality of their lattice-reduction (LR)-aided linear
counterparts. The results hold for all channel statistics, for all channel
dimensions, and most interestingly, irrespective of the particular lattice-code
applied. As a special case, it is established that the LLL-based LR-aided
linear implementation of the MMSE-GDFE lattice decoder facilitates DMT optimal
decoding of any lattice code at a worst-case complexity that grows at most
linearly in the data rate. This represents a fundamental reduction in the
decoding complexity when compared to ML decoding whose complexity is generally
exponential in rate.
  The results' generality lends them applicable to a plethora of pertinent
communication scenarios such as quasi-static MIMO, MIMO-OFDM, ISI,
cooperative-relaying, and MIMO-ARQ channels, in all of which the DMT optimality
of the LR-aided linear decoder is guaranteed. The adopted approach yields
insight, and motivates further study, into joint transceiver designs with an
improved SNR gap to ML decoding.
