The design of lattice coset codes for wiretap channels is considered. Bounds on the eavesdropper's correct decoding probability and information leakage are first revisited. From these bounds, it is explicit that both the information leakage and error probability are controlled by the average flatness factor of the eavesdropper's lattice, which we further interpret geometrically. It is concluded that the minimization of the (average) flatness factor of the eavesdropper's lattice leads to the study of well-rounded lattices, which are shown to be among the optimal in order to achieve these minima. Constructions of some well-rounded lattices are also provided.

In this paper, we study lattice coding for Rician fading wireless channels. This is motivated in particular by preliminary studies suggesting the Rician fading model for millimeter-wavelength wireless communications. We restrict to lattice codes arising from rotations of Zn, and to a single-input single-output (SISO) channel. We observe that several lattice design criteria suggest the optimality of Hadamard rotations. For instance, we prove that Hadamard rotations maximize the diamond-packing density among all rotated Znlattices. Finally, we provide simulations to show that Hadamard rotations outperform optimal algebraic rotations and cross-packing lattices in the Rician channel.

For many wiretap channel models asymptotically optimal coding schemes are known, but less effort has been put into actual realizations of wiretap codes for practical parameters. Bounds on the mutual information and error probability when using coset coding on a Rayleigh fading channel were recently established by Oggier and Belfiore, and the results in this paper build on their work. However, instead of using their ultimate inverse norm sum approximation, a more precise expression for the eavesdropper's probability of correct decision is used in order to determine a general class of good coset codes. The code constructions are based on well-rounded lattices arising from simple geometric criteria. In addition to new coset codes and simulation results, novel number-theoretic results on well-rounded ideal lattices are presented.

We consider lattice coset-coded transmissions over a wiretap channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Examining a function that can be interpreted as either the legitimate receiver's error probability or the eavesdropper's correct decision probability, we rigorously show that, albeit offering simple bit labeling, orthogonal nested lattices are suboptimal for coset coding in terms of both the legitimate receiver's and the eavesdropper's probabilities.