AWGN-Goodness is Enough: Capacity-Achieving Lattice Codes based on Dithered Probabilistic Shaping (1707.06688v4)

Abstract: In this paper we show that any sequence of infinite lattice constellations which is good for the unconstrained Gaussian channel can be shaped into a capacity-achieving sequence of codes for the power-constrained Gaussian channel under lattice decoding and non-uniform signalling. Unlike previous results in the literature, our scheme holds with no extra condition on the lattices (e.g. quantization-goodness or vanishing flatness factor), thus establishing a direct implication between AWGN-goodness, in the sense of Poltyrev, and capacity-achieving codes. Our analysis uses properties of the discrete Gaussian distribution in order to obtain precise bounds on the probability of error and achievable rates. In particular, we obtain a simple characterization of the finite-blocklength behavior of the scheme, showing that it approaches the optimal dispersion coefficient for \textit{high} signal-to-noise ratio. We further show that for \textit{low} signal-to-noise ratio the discrete Gaussian over centered lattice constellations can not achieve capacity, and thus a shift (or "dither") is essentially necessary.