Cyclic unequal error protection codes constructed from cyclic codes of composite length

The unequal error correction capabilities of binary cyclic codes of composite length are investigated. Under certain conditions, direct sums of concatenated codes have unequal error correction capabilities. By a modified Hartmann and Tzeng (1973) algorithm, it is shown that a binary cyclic code of composite length is equivalent to the direct sum of concatenated codes. With this, some binary cyclic unequal error protection (UEP) codes are constructed. Finally, the authors present a class of two-level UEP cyclic direct-sum codes which provide error correction capabilities higher than those guaranteed by the Blokh-Zyablov (1974) constructions