Concatenated codes have many remarkable properties from both the theoretical and practical viewpoints. The minimum distance of a concatenated code is at least the product of the minimum distances of an outer code and an inner code. In this paper, we shall examine some cases that the minimum distance of concatenated codes is beyond the lower bound and get the tighter bound or the true minimum distance of concatenated codes by using the complete weight enumerator of the outer code and the Hamming weight enumerator of the inner code. Furthermore we propose a new decoding method based on Reddy-Robinson algorithm by using the decoding method beyond the BCH bound.

A multicast error control protocol proposed by Metzner is generalized and the performance of the proposed protocol on random error channels (binary symmetric channels) is analyzed. The proposed protocol adopts an encoding procedure based on a product code structure, whith enables each destined user terminal to decode the received frames with the Reddy-Robinson algorithm. As a result, the performance degradation due to the re-broadcasting of the replicas of the previously transmitted frames can be circumvented. The numerical results for the analysis and the simulation indicate that the proposed protocol yields higher throughput and less degradation of throughput with an increase of the number of destined terminals.