The Voronoi Spherical CDF for Lattices and Linear Codes: New Bounds for Quantization and Coding

For a lattice/linear code, we define the Voronoi spherical cumulative density function (CDF) as the CDF of the $\ell_2$-norm/Hamming weight of a random vector uniformly distributed over the Voronoi cell. Using the first moment method together with a simple application of Jensen's inequality, we develop lower bounds on the expected Voronoi spherical CDF of a random lattice/linear code. Our bounds are valid for any finite dimension and are quite close to a ball-based lower bound. They immediately translate to new non-asymptotic upper bounds on the normalized second moment and the error probability of a random lattice over the additive white Gaussian noise channel, as well as new non-asymptotic upper bounds on the Hamming distortion and the error probability of a random linear code over the binary symmetric channel. In particular, we show that for most lattices in $\mathbb{R}^n$ the second moment is greater than that of a Euclidean ball with the same covolume only by a $\left(1+O(\frac{1}{n})\right)$ multiplicative factor. Similarly, for most linear codes in $\mathbb{F}_2^n$ the expected Hamming distortion is greater than that of a corresponding Hamming ball only by an additive universal constant.