In this paper, we address the design of high spectral-efficiency Barnes-Wall (BW) lattice codes which are amenable to low-complexity decoding in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. We propose a new method of constructing complex BW lattice codes from linear codes over polynomial rings, and show that the proposed construction provides an explicit method of bit-labeling complex BW lattice codes. To decode the code, we adapt the low-complexity sequential BW lattice decoder (SBWD) recently proposed by Micciancio and Nicolosi. First, we study the error performance of SBWD in decoding the infinite lattice, wherein we analyze the noise statistics in the algorithm, and propose a new upper bound on its error performance. We show that the SBWD is powerful in making correct decisions well beyond the packing radius. Subsequently, we use the SBWD to decode lattice codes through a novel noise-trimming technique. This is the first work that showcases the error performance of SBWD in decoding BW lattice codes of large block lengths.
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