The Characteristic Generators for a Group Code

In this letter, we discussed some properties of characteristic generators for a finite Abelian group code, proved that any two characteristic generators can not start (end) at the same position and have the same order of the starting (ending) components simultaneously, and that the number of all characteristic generators can be directly computed from the group code itself. These properties are exactly the generalization of the corresponding trellis properties of a linear code over a field. key words: basic spans, biproper p-basis, characteristic generators, conventional trellises, tail-biting trellises