Well-Rounded Lattices for Coset Coding in MIMO Wiretap Channels

Abstract: The concept of well-rounded lattices has recently found important applications in the setting of a fading single-input single-output (SISO) wiretap channel. It has been shown that, under this setup, the property of being well-rounded is critical for minimizing the eavesdropper's probability of correct decoding in lower SNR regimes. The superior performance of coset codes constructed from well-rounded lattices has been illustrated in several simulations. In the present article, this work is extended to fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channels, and similar design criteria as in the SISO case are derived. Further, explicit coset codes for Rayleigh fading MIMO wiretap channels are designed. In particular, it is shown through extensive simulations that sublattices of the well-known Alamouti code and Golden code which meet our design criteria perform better than scalar multiples of the code lattice for the same parameters.