Construction A of Lattices over Number Fields and Block Fading Wiretap Coding

Abstract: We propose a lattice construction from totally real and CM fields, which naturally generalizes the Construction A of lattices from $p$-ary codes obtained from the cyclotomic field $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_p)$, $p$ a prime, which in turn contains the so-called Construction A of lattices from binary codes as a particular case. We focus on the maximal totally real subfield $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{p^r}+\zeta_{p}^{-r})$ of the cyclotomic field $\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{p^r})$, $r\geq 1$. Our construction has applications to coset encoding of algebraic lattice codes, and we detail the case of coset encoding of block fading wiretap codes.