Derivative Descendants and Ascendants of Binary Cyclic Codes, and Derivative Decoding

This paper defines cyclic and minimal derivative descendants (DDs) of an extended cyclic code from the derivative of the Mattson-Solomon polynomials, respectively. First, it demonstrates that the cyclic DDs are the same extended cyclic code. It allows us to perform soft-decision decoding for extended cyclic codes based on their cyclic DDs. Then, it proves that the minimal DDs are equivalent codes. It also allows us to perform soft-decision decoding based on the minimal DDs with permutations. Simulation results show that our proposed derivative decoding can be close to the maximum likelihood decoding for certain extended cyclic codes, including some extended BCH codes.