An upper bound on the effective error coefficient of two-stage decoding, and good two-level decompositions of some Reed-Muller codes

An upper bound on the effective error coefficient of a two-level code with two-stage decoding is presented. This bound provides a guideline for constructing two-level codes to achieve a good trade-off between the error performance and decoding complexity. Based on this bound, good two-level decompositions of some Reed-Muller codes for two-stage decoding are found. Simulation results on the error performances of some Reed-Muller codes of lengths up to 64 with two-stage soft-decision suboptimum decoding based on their two-level decompositions are given