Lattice coding and decoding have been shown to achieve the capacity of the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. This was accomplished using a minimum mean-square error scaling and randomization to transform the AWGN channel into a modulo-lat
tice additive noise channel of the same capacity. It has been further shown that when operating at rates below capacity but above the critical rate of the channel, there exists a rate-dependent scaling such that the associated modulo-lattice channel attains the error exponent of the AWGN channel. A geometric explanation for this result is developed. In particular, it is shown how the geometry of typical error events for the modulo-lattice channel coincides with that of a spherical code for the AWGN channel.
A simple lemma is derived that allows to transform a general scalar (non-Gaussian, non-additive) continuous-alphabet channel as well as a general multiple-access channel into a modulo-additive noise channel. While in general the transformation is inf
ormation lossy, it allows to leverage linear coding techniques and capacity results derived for networks comprised of additive Gaussian nodes to more general networks.
