In this correspondence, constructions of generalized concatenated (GC) codes with good rates and distances are presented. Some of the proposed GC codes have simpler trellis omplexity than Euclidean geometry (EG), Reed–Muller (RM), or Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) codes of approximately the same rates and minimum distances, and in addition can be decoded with trellis-based multistage decoding up to their minimum distances. Several codes of the same length, dimension, and minimum distance as the best linear codes known are constructed
