Design of efficient codes for the AWGN channel based on decomposable binary lattices

This work is concerned with the use of binary decomposable lattice codes over the QAM Gaussian channel. First, we investigate the structure of such class of lattices: we derive consistency conditions for the binary codes appearing in their decomposition and express their nominal coding gain and some bounds for their error coefficient in terms of the parameters of the component codes. Then we describe a general multistage bounded-distance decoding algorithm with low complexity and we evaluate its performance. Finally, we develop a design example and report the corresponding simulation results; as a reference some comparisons with standard TCM codes are also presented.