Affine Reflection Group Codes

This correspondence presents a construction of affine reflection group codes. The solution to the initial vector and nearest distance problem is presented for all irreducible affine reflection groups of rank n ges 2, for varying stabilizer subgroups. We use a detailed analysis of the geometry of affine reflection groups to produce a decoding algorithm which is equivalent to the maximum-likelihood decoder, yet whose complexity depends only on the dimension of the vector space containing the codewords, and not on the number of codewords. We give several examples of the decoding algorithm, both to demonstrate its correctness and to show how, in small rank cases, it may be further streamlined by exploiting additional symmetries of the group.