Abstract-Recently, lattice reduction has been widely used for signal detection in multiinput multioutput (MIMO) communications. In this paper, we present three novel lattice reduction algorithms. First, using a unimodular transformation, a significant improvement on an existing Hermite-Korkine-Zolotareff-reduction algorithm is proposed. Then, we present two practical algorithms for constructing Minkowski-reduced bases. To assess the output quality, we compare the orthogonality defect of the reduced bases produced by LLL algorithm and our new algorithms, and find that in practice Minkowski-reduced basis vectors are the closest to being orthogonal. An error-rate analysis of suboptimal decoding algorithms aided by different reduction notions is also presented. To this aim, the proximity factor is employed as a measurement. We improve some existing results and derive upper bounds for the proximity factors of Minkowski-reduction-aided decoding (MRAD) to show that MRAD can achieve the same diversity order with infinite lattice decoding (ILD).