Linear tail-biting trellises, the square-root bound, and applications for Reed-Muller codes

Abstract

Linear tail-biting trellises for block codes are considered. By introducing the notions of subtrellis, merging interval, and sub-tail-biting trellis, some structural properties of linear tail-biting trellises are proved. It is shown that a linear tail-biting trellis always has a certain simple structure, the parallel-merged-cosets structure. A necessary condition required from a linear code in order to have a linear tail-biting trellis representation that achieves the square root bound is presented. Finally, the above condition is used to show that for r/spl ges/2 and m/spl ges/4r-1 or r/spl ges/4 and r+3/spl les/m/spl les/[(4r+5)/3] the Reed-Muller code RM(r, m) under any bit order cannot be represented by a linear tail-biting trellis whose state complexity is half of that of the minimal (conventional) trellis for the code under the standard bit order.