On the sphere-decoding algorithm I. Expected complexity

The problem of finding the least-squares solution to a system of linear equations where the unknown vector is comprised of integers, but the matrix coefficient and given vector are comprised of real numbers, arises in many applications: communications, cryptography, GPS, to name a few. The problem is equivalent to finding the closest lattice point to a given point and is known to be NP-hard. In communications applications, however, the given vector is not arbitrary but rather is an unknown lattice point that has been perturbed by an additive noise vector whose statistical properties are known. Therefore, in this paper, rather than dwell on the worst-case complexity of the integer least-squares problem, we…