Multilevel codes and multistage decoding

H. Imai and S. Hirakawa have proposed (1977) a multilevel coding method based on binary block codes that admits a staged decoding procedure. The author extends the coding method to coset codes and shows how to calculate minimum squared distance and path multiplicity in terms of the norms and multiplicities of the different cosets. The multilevel structure allows the redundancy in the coset selection procedure to be allocated efficiently among the different levels. It also allows the use of suboptimal multistage decoding procedures that have performance/complexity advantages over maximum-likelihood decoding