APPROXIMATELY GAUSSIAN WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION OF THE ITERATED PRODUCT OFSINGLE-PARITY-CHECK CODES

It has been argued by Battail that for the goodness of long block code s a better criterion to use than the minimum Hamming distance is the c loseness of the normalised weight distribution of the code to a Gaussi an distribution. Certain iterated-product codes have recently been sho wn to provide good performance in spite of having a relatively poor Ha mming distance. The authors substantiate the arguments of Battail by s howing that these iterated-product codes have a weight distribution th at is approximately Gaussian even for relatively short lengths.