  Linear receivers are often used to reduce the implementation complexity of
multiple-antenna systems. In a traditional linear receiver architecture, the
receive antennas are used to separate out the codewords sent by each transmit
antenna, which can then be decoded individually. Although easy to implement,
this approach can be highly suboptimal when the channel matrix is near
singular. This paper develops a new linear receiver architecture that uses the
receive antennas to create an effective channel matrix with integer-valued
entries. Rather than attempting to recover transmitted codewords directly, the
decoder recovers integer combinations of the codewords according to the entries
of the effective channel matrix. The codewords are all generated using the same
linear code which guarantees that these integer combinations are themselves
codewords. Provided that the effective channel is full rank, these integer
combinations can then be digitally solved for the original codewords. This
paper focuses on the special case where there is no coding across transmit
antennas and no channel state information at the transmitter(s), which
corresponds either to a multi-user uplink scenario or to single-user V-BLAST
encoding. In this setting, the proposed integer-forcing linear receiver
significantly outperforms conventional linear architectures such as the
zero-forcing and linear MMSE receiver. In the high SNR regime, the proposed
receiver attains the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for the standard
MIMO channel with no coding across transmit antennas. It is further shown that
in an extended MIMO model with interference, the integer-forcing linear
receiver achieves the optimal generalized degrees-of-freedom.
