Computing coset leaders and leader codewords of binary codes

Communicated by [editor] In this paper we use the Gröbner representation of a binary linear code C to give efficient algorithms for computing the whole set of coset leaders, denoted by CL(C) and the set of leader codewords, denoted by L(C). The first algorithm could be adapted to provide not only the Newton and the covering radius of C but also to determine the coset leader weight distribution. Moreover, providing the set of leader codewords we have a test-set for decoding by a gradient-like decoding algorithm. Another contribution of this article is the relation stablished between zero neighbours and leader codewords.