  We introduce the notion of the stopping redundancy hierarchy of a linear
block code as a measure of the trade-off between performance and complexity of
iterative decoding for the binary erasure channel. We derive lower and upper
bounds for the stopping redundancy hierarchy via Lovasz's Local Lemma and
Bonferroni-type inequalities, and specialize them for codes with cyclic
parity-check matrices. Based on the observed properties of parity-check
matrices with good stopping redundancy characteristics, we develop a novel
decoding technique, termed automorphism group decoding, that combines iterative
message passing and permutation decoding. We also present bounds on the
smallest number of permutations of an automorphism group decoder needed to
correct any set of erasures up to a prescribed size. Simulation results
demonstrate that for a large number of algebraic codes, the performance of the
new decoding method is close to that of maximum likelihood decoding.
