Trellis-Oriented Decomposition and Trellis Complexity of Composite-Length Cyclic Codes

The trellis complexity of composite-length cyclic codes (CLCC's) is addressed. We first investigate the trellis properties of concatenated and product codes in general. Known factoring of CLCC's into concatenated subcodes is thereby employed to derive upper bounds on the minimal trellis size and state-space profile. New decomposition of CLCC's into product subcodes is established and utilized to derive further upper bounds on the trellis parameters. The coordinate permutations that correspond to these bounds are exhibited. Additionally, new results on the generalized Hamming weights of CLCC's are obtained. The reduction in trellis complexity of many CLCC's leads to soft-decision decoders with relatively low complexity.