Connections Between Construction D and Related Constructions of Lattices

Most practical constructions of lattice codes with high coding gains are multilevel constructions where each level corresponds to an underlying code component. Construction D, Construction D$'$, and Forney's code formula are classical constructions that produce such lattices explicitly from a family of nested binary linear codes. In this paper, we investigate these three closely related constructions along with the recently developed Construction A$'$ of lattices from codes over the polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}_2[u]/u^a$. We show that Construction by Code Formula produces a lattice packing if and only if the nested codes being used are closed under Schur product, thus proving the similarity of Construction D and Construction by Code Formula when applied to Reed-Muller codes. In addition, we relate Construction by Code Formula to Construction A$'$ by finding a correspondence between nested binary codes and codes over $\mathbb{F}_2[u]/u^a$. This proves that any lattice constructible using Construction by Code Formula is also constructible using Construction A$'$. Finally, we show that Construction A$'$ produces a lattice if and only if the corresponding code over $\mathbb{F}_2[u]/u^a$ is closed under shifted Schur product.