A New Construction of Nonlinear Unequal Error Protection Codes

Mao-Ching C h i u a n d Chi-chao C h a o
Department of Electrical Engineering. National Tsing Hua Lniversity. Hsinchu, Taiwan 30043, R.O.C.
A h s l r u c t - We propose a new construction of nonlinear unequal error protection (UEP) block codes
whose encoding complexity is approximately equivalent t o the decoding complexity of a linear block code.
Some classes of codes that are better than any linear
UEP codes with the same parameters are presented.

I. INTRODUCTION
In the literature studies of U E P block codes were mainly
concentrated on linear codes because of easy implementation
of encoding and decoding. However, t,here are nonlinear UEP
block codes t h a t are bstter than any linear ones. In [1][2] a
construction of such codes were presented along with examples, which is based on t h e idea of superimposing codeword
clouds originally introduced by Cover. Rut the drawback of
the construction in [1][2] is t h a t therp do riot appear to he
easily implementation methods of encoding. We propose a
new constriiction of nonlinear U E P block codes wliose encociing coniplcxity is approximately equivalent t o the decoding
comp1exit.v of a linear block code.

11. DESCRIPTION
OF

Singleton bound. n

SI

+ kl +

IC2 -

1. T h e second one is

~~~, +

a genrralization of the Griesrrier bound: n 2

kifk2
Kotations n~ and RG will b e used t o reprc-

x7=ki+l
1 +1.

sent thrse tv-o lowrr bounds.

IYith this new construction, there exist codes which are better than any linear ones. For example, let C1 b e a repetition
code of length 24 and (723 be a (24,23) parity check code. We
can irlioose C2 to be a (24,12) extended Golay code because
the ( 2 4 , 1 2 ) extended Golay code is a subcode of the (24,23)
parity check code. The covering radius of the (24,12) extended Golay code is 4. Hence this construction gives kl = 1,
k2 = 11. s1 2 24 - 2 4 = 16, and s2 2 2. T h e bounds give
72.5 =: TIC; 2 27. However: our construction only has n, = 24.
Other new U E P codes can be constructed from BCH codes
and Reed-hIuller codes. Examples of these codes which are
better t h a n any linear ones with the same parameters are given
in Tab. 1 and Tab. 2.
Tab. 1: Examples of 1JE.P codes coristriicted from RCI-I codes of
length 2m - 1 which are are better than any linear codes. (NC: no
coding, SEC, DEC. TEC: SEC, DEC, TEC BCH code.)

CONSTRUCTION

Here for simplicity we only consider two-level UEP codes.

Let C be a n ( n , k l
k z ) U E P code for the message space
Dl1 x M 2 , where A/l, = GF(c~)~
for i = 1:2. Each message
m can be written as (mi!mz). where m, E , 2 l Z : for i = 1 . 2 .
IJct c(m) d e n o k the corresponding cotle~vordin C for the
message m. T h e error-correcting capability of a IIEP block
code i s described by its separation vector s = ( s i .5 2 ) defined
by s z = m i n { d ( c ( m ) . c ( m ) ) : m, # mi}, for z = 1 . 2 . where
d(a: b) denotes the Hamming distance between a and b. Let
CI, C 2 , and C 3 be linear codes of block length n and generator
matrix G I . G2, a n d G?! respectively. Define Ca.?to be the code
with generator matrix [GT,GT]. T h e important message
ml is encoded t o a codeword c1 in Cj. T h e less important
message m2 is first encoded to a codeword c2 in Cz. T h e
codeword c g is then decoded by using a complete nearestneighbor decoder of C y and the output codeword denoted by
C ~ ( C Z )t C3 is produced. The codeword b which carries the
less important message m2 is obtained thy b = c2
cx(c2).
T h e final transmitted codeword c = clt-b. Clearly, the overall
two-level URP code C = CI B;where B i s the set of all b.
Imperty 1 : If all the rows of [GT,G;lT are linear independent.
the encoding mapping from the less important message space
M z t o B i s onr-to-one.
Let w represent the maximum weight of codewords b E B.
Sincc all b are rninimurn-weight, coset leaders of C3, we have
w 5 p, where p is the covering radius of C y defined by p =
inax {min { l y cI : c t C,} : y G CF(q)?}.Let dl denote thc
REFERENCES
minirrium distance of CI and d 2 3 he the minimum distance of
[l] E. K. Engliind, Nonlinear unequal error-protection codes are
thp code C23.
sometimes better ttLaiilinear ones, IEEE Trans. I n f o r m . TheP r o p e r t y 2: SI 2 d l - 2w 2 d l - 2p.
OTY. vol. IT-37, pp. 1418-1420, Sep. 1991.
P r o p e r t y 3: If dl 2 d23 2w. s 2 2 dZ3.
[ 2 ] E. K. Fhgluiiti, Konliricsr unequal error-protcction codes exConsider two lower bounds on block length for linear U E P
ceeding Katsrnari boiind, Proc. f994 IEEE Int. Symp. Incodes. ?he first bound is a generalization of the well-known
form. Theory. Trondheim, Korway, p. 502, June 1994.

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