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Linear codes generated by component functions of perfect nonlinear (PN for short) and almost perfect nonlinear (APN for short) functions and the first-order Reed-Muller codes have been an object of intensive study in coding theory. The objective of this paper is to investigate some binary shortened codes of two families of linear codes from APN functions and some $p$ -ary shortened codes associated with PN functions. The weight distributions of these shortened codes and the parameters of their duals are determined. The parameters of these binary codes and $p$ -ary codes are flexible. Many of the codes presented in this paper are optimal or almost optimal. The results of this paper show that the shortening technique is very promising for constructing good codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity are important cryptographic primitives in some stream ciphers. In this paper, two methodologies for constructing minimal binary codes from sets, Boolean functions and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity, are proposed. More precisely, a general construction of new minimal codes using minimal codes contained in Reed-Muller codes and sets without nonzero low degree annihilators is presented. The other construction allows us to yield minimal codes from certain subcodes of Reed-Muller codes and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity. Via these general constructions, infinite families of minimal binary linear codes of dimension $m$ and length less than or equal to $m(m+1)/2$ are obtained. Besides, a lower bound on the minimum distance of the proposed minimal linear codes is established. Conjectures and open problems are also presented. The results of this paper show that Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity have nice applications in several fields additionally to symmetric cryptography, such as coding theory and secret sharing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reed-Muller codes are error-correcting codes used in many areas related to coding theory, such as electrical engineering and computer science. The binary $r^{th}$ -order Reed-Muller code $RM(r,n)$ can be viewed as the set of all $n$ -variable Boolean functions of algebraic degree at most $r$. Despite the intense work on these codes, many problems are known to be hard (notably, determining their covering radius) and remain open to this day. Fourteen years ago, Carlet and Mesnager improved in [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, “Improving the Upper Bounds on the Covering Radii of Binary Reed-Muller Codes”, 53(1), 2007] the upper bound on the covering radius of the Reed-Muller code of order 2, and they deduced improved upper bounds on the covering radii of the Reed-Muller codes of higher orders. Until 2021, these upper bounds remained the best ones in the literature. The Reed-Muller code $RM(n-3,n)$ , which corresponds to the dual of the Reed-Muller code $RM(2,n)$ , has attracted much attention. One of the main reasons is that it is precisely the code that has been considered to get the upper bounds derived by Carlet and Mesnager. Those upper bounds have been obtained thanks to the characterization of the codewords of the Reed-Muller code, whose Hamming weights are strictly less than 2.5 times the minimum distance $2^{n-r}$ due to Kasami, Tokura, and Azumi. Despite their impressive work in the seventieth, a more refined study and profound description of those codewords of ${RM}({n-3},{n})$ whose Hamming weight equals 16, and especially 18, seem necessary, as it could help us significantly in improving the covering radius of Reed-Muller codes. In this paper, we push further the known results on the Reed-Muller codes by focusing on the Reed-Muller code ${RM}({n-3},{n})$. We provide a classification of the codewords of weights 16 and 18 of the Reed-Muller code $RM(n-3,n)$. Our algebraic descriptions allow us to count the number of such codewords and to enumerate all of them explicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boolean functions, coding theory and $t$ -designs have close connections and interesting interplay. A standard approach to constructing $t$ -designs is the use of linear codes with certain regularity. The Assmus-Mattson Theorem and the automorphism groups are two ways for proving that a code has sufficient regularity for supporting $t$ -designs. However, some linear codes hold $t$ -designs, although they do not satisfy the conditions in the Assmus-Mattson Theorem and do not admit a $t$ -transitive or $t$ -homogeneous group as a subgroup of their automorphisms. The major objective of this paper is to develop a theory for explaining such codes and obtaining such new codes and hence new $t$ -designs. To this end, a general theory for punctured and shortened codes of linear codes supporting $t$ -designs is established, a generalized Assmus-Mattson theorem is developed, and a link between 2-designs and differentially $\delta $ -uniform functions and 2-designs is built. With these general results, binary codes with new parameters and explicit weight distributions are obtained, new 2-designs and Steiner system $S(2, 4, 2^{n})$ are produced in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of universal source coding for binary trees is considered. Zhang, Yang, and Kieffer derived upper bounds on the average-case redundancy of codes based on directed acyclic graph (DAG) compression for binary tree sources with certain properties. In this paper, a natural class of binary tree sources is presented such that the demanded properties are fulfilled. Moreover, for both subclasses considered in the paper of Zhang, Yang, and Kieffer, their result is improved by deriving bounds on the maximal pointwise redundancy (or worst-case redundancy) instead of the average-case redundancy. Finally, using context-free tree grammars instead of DAGs, upper bounds on the maximal pointwise redundancy for certain binary tree sources are derived. This yields universal codes for new classes of binary tree sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates fundamental properties of nonlinear binary codes by looking at the codebook matrix not row-wise (codewords), but column-wise. The family of weak flip codes is presented and shown to contain many beautiful properties. In particular the subfamily fair weak flip codes, which goes back to Shannon et al. and which was shown to achieve the error exponent with a fixed number of codewords $\mathsf {M}$ , can be seen as a generalization of linear codes to an arbitrary number of codewords. The fair weak flip codes are related to binary nonlinear Hadamard codes. Based on the column-wise approach to the codebook matrix, the $r$ -wise Hamming distance is introduced as a generalization to the well-known and widely used (pairwise) Hamming distance. It is shown that the minimum $r$ -wise Hamming distance satisfies a generalized $r$ -wise Plotkin bound. The $r$ -wise Hamming distance structure of the nonlinear fair weak flip codes is analyzed and shown to be superior to many codes. In particular, it is proven that the fair weak flip codes achieve the $r$ -wise Plotkin bound with equality for all $r$. In the second part of this paper, these insights are applied to a binary erasure channel with an arbitrary erasure probability 0 < $\delta$ < 1. An exact formula for the average error probability of an arbitrary (linear or nonlinear) code using maximum likelihood decoding is derived and shown to be expressible using only the $r$ -wise Hamming distance structure of the code. For a number of codewords $\mathsf {M}$ satisfying $\mathsf {M}\le 4$ and an arbitrary finite blocklength $n$ , the globally optimal codes (in the sense of minimizing the average error probability) are found. For $\mathsf {M}$ = 5 or $\mathsf {M}$ = 6 and an arbitrary finite blocklength $n$ , the optimal codes are conjectured. For larger $\mathsf {M}$ , observations regarding the optimal design are presented, e.g., that good codes have a large $r$ -wise Hamming distance structure for all $r$. Numerical results validate our code design criteria and show the superiority of our best found nonlinear weak flip codes compared with the best linear codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MDS codes and self-dual codes are important families of classical codes in coding theory. Therefore, it is of interest to investigate MDS self-dual codes. The existence of MDS self-dual codes over finite field ${\mathbb F}_{q}$ is competely solved for $q$ is even. In the literature, there are many known constructions of MDS self-dual codes for $q$ is odd. In this paper, we present a unified approach on the existence of MDS self-dual codes with concise statements and simplified proof. It is illustrated that some of known results can also be stated in this framework. Furthermore, we can obtain some new MDS self-dual codes, especially for the case when $q$ is not a square. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given n items with at most d of which being positive, instead of testing these items individually, the theory of combinatorial group testing aims to identify all positive items using as few tests as possible. This paper is devoted to a fundamental and thirty-year-old problem in the nonadaptive group testing theory. A binary matrix is called d -disjunct if the Boolean sum of arbitrary d columns does not contain another column not in this collection. Let T(d) denote the minimal t , such that there exists a t\times n\,\,d -disjunct matrix with n>t and was conjectured that T(d)\ge (d+1)^{2} . In this paper, we narrow the gap by proving T(d)/d^{2}\ge (15+\sqrt {33})/24$ , a quantity in [6/7,7/8]. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We show an explicit (that is, efficient and deterministic) capacity approaching interactive coding scheme that simulates any interactive protocol under random errors with nearly optimal communication rate. Specifically, over the binary symmetric channel with crossover probability $\epsilon $ , our coding scheme achieves a communication rate of $1 - O(\sqrt {H({\epsilon })})$ , together with negligible $\exp (-\Omega (\epsilon ^{4}\,\,n/\log n))$ failure probability (over the randomness of the channel). A rate of $1 - \tilde \Theta (\sqrt {H({\epsilon })})$ is likely asymptotically optimal as a result of Kol and Raz (2013) suggests. Prior to this paper, such a communication rate was achievable only using randomized coding schemes [Kol and Raz (2013); Hauepler (2014)]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important open problems in the theory of error-correcting codes is to determine the tradeoff between the rate $R$ and minimum distance $\delta $ of a binary code. The best known tradeoff is the Gilbert–Varshamov bound, and says that for every $\delta \in (0, 1/2)$ , there are codes with minimum distance $\delta $ and rate $R = {R_{\mathsf {GV}}}(\delta) > 0$ (for a certain simple function ${R_{\mathsf {GV}}}(\cdot)$ ). In this paper, we show that the Gilbert–Varshamov bound can be achieved by codes, which support local error-detection and error-correction algorithms. Specifically, we show the following results. 1) Local testing: for all $\delta \in (0,1/2)$ and all $R < {R_{\mathsf {GV}}}(\delta)$ , there exist codes with length $n$ , rate $R$ , and minimum distance $\delta $ that are locally testable with $\mathsf {quasipolylog}(n)$ query complexity. 2) Local correction: for all $\epsilon > 0$ , for all $\delta < 1/2$ sufficiently large, and all $R < (1-\epsilon) {R_{\mathsf {GV}}}(\delta)$ , there exist codes with length $n$ , rate $R$ , and minimum distance $\delta $ that are locally correctable from $({\delta }/{2}) - o(1)$ fraction errors with $O(n^{\epsilon })$ query complexity. Furthermore, these codes have an efficient randomized construction, and the local testing and local correction algorithms can be made to run in time polynomial in the query complexity. Our results on locally correctable codes also immediately give locally decodable codes with the same parameters. Our local testing result is obtained by combining Thommesen’s random concatenation technique and the best known locally testable codes by Kopparty et al. Our local correction result, which is significantly more involved, also uses random concatenation, along with a number of further ideas: the Guruswami–Sudan–Indyk list decoding strategy for concatenated codes, Alon–Edmonds–Luby distance amplification, and the local list-decodability, local list-recoverability, and local testability of Reed–Muller codes. Curiously, our final local correction algorithms go via local list-decoding and local testing algorithms; this seems to be the first time local testability is used in the construction of a locally correctable code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, code decompositions (a.k.a. code nestings) are used to design binary polarization kernels. The proposed kernels are in general nonlinear. They provide a better polarization exponent than the previously known kernels of the same dimensions. In particular, nonlinear kernels of dimensions 14, 15, and 16 are constructed and are shown to have optimal asymptotic error-correction performance. The optimality is proved by showing that the exponents of these kernels achieve a new upper bound that is developed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Johnson-type upper bound on the maximum size of a code of length n , distance d=2w-1 , and constant composition \overline w is \lfloor \dfrac \vphantom R^.nw1\rfloor , where w is the total weight and w_{1} is the largest component of {\overline {w}} . Recently, Chee et al. proved that this upper bound can be achieved for all constant-composition codes of sufficiently large lengths. Let Nccc({\overline {w}}) be the smallest such length. The determination of Nccc({\overline {w}}) is trivial for binary codes. This paper provides a lower bound on Nccc({\overline {w}}) , which is shown to be tight for all ternary and quaternary codes by giving new combinatorial constructions. Consequently, by the refining method, we determine the values of Nccc({\overline {w}}) , for all $q$ -ary constant-composition codes, provided that 3w_{1}\geq w with finite possible exceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Codes over Galois rings have been studied extensively during the last three decades. Negacyclic codes over \mathop \mathrm GR\nolimits (2^a,m) of length 2^s have been characterized: the ring \mathcal R2(a,m,-1)= {\mathrm{ GR}}(2^{a},m)[x]/\langle x^{2^{s}}+1\rangle is a chain ring. Furthermore, these results have been generalized to \lambda -constacyclic codes for any unit \lambda of the form 4z-1 , . In this paper, we study more general cases and investigate all cases, where {\mathcal{ R}}_{p}(a,m,\gamma) = {\mathrm{ GR}}(p^{a},m)[x]/\langle x^{p^{s}}-\gamma \rangle is a chain ring. In particular, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the ring {\mathcal{ R}}_{p}(a,m,\gamma) to be a chain ring are obtained. In addition, by using this structure we investigate all \gamma -constacyclic codes over \mathop {\mathrm {GR}}\nolimits (p^{a},m) when {\mathcal{ R}}_{p}(a,m,\gamma)$ is a chain ring. The necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of self-orthogonal and self-dual \gamma$ -constacyclic codes are also provided. Among others, for any prime p$ , the structure of is used to establish the Hamming and homogeneous distances of $\gamma$ -constacyclic codes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiply constant-weight codes (MCWCs) have been recently studied to improve the reliability of certain physically unclonable function response. In this paper, we give combinatorial constructions for the MCWCs, which yield several new infinite families of optimal MCWCs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Johnson-type upper bounds of the MCWCs are asymptotically tight for fixed Hamming weights and distances. Finally, we provide bounds and constructions of the 2-D MCWCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we solve the open problems raised in [8] and present some examples to illustrate the obtained results. Moreover, we work out the diophantine problem by Shi and Wang and then give the sufficient conditions for the nonexistence of two-Lee weight projective codes over \mathbb Z4 with type 4^k12^{k2} . [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Projective Reed–Muller codes were introduced by Lachaud in 1988 and their dimension and minimum distance were determined by Serre and Sørensen in 1991. In coding theory, one is also interested in the higher Hamming weights, to study the code performance. Yet, not many values of the higher Hamming weights are known for these codes, not even the second lowest weight (also known as the next-to-minimal weight) is completely determined. In this paper, we determine all the values of the next-to-minimal weight for the binary projective Reed–Muller codes, which we show to be equal to the next-to-minimal weight of Reed–Muller codes in most, but not all, cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most bounds on the size of codes hold for any code, whether linear or not. Notably, the Griesmer bound holds only in the linear case and so optimal linear codes are not necessarily optimal codes. In this paper, we identify code parameters $(q,d,k)$ , namely, field size, minimum distance, and combinatorial dimension, for which the Griesmer bound also holds in the (systematic) nonlinear case. Moreover, we show that the Griesmer bound does not necessarily hold for a systematic code by explicit construction of a family of optimal systematic binary codes. On the other hand, we are able to provide some versions of the Griesmer bound holding for all the systematic codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a locally recoverable or repairable code, any symbol of a codeword can be recovered by reading only a small (constant) number of other symbols. The notion of local recoverability is important in the area of distributed storage where a most frequent error-event is a single storage node failure (erasure). A common objective is to repair the node by downloading data from as few other storage nodes as possible. In this paper, we bound the minimum distance of a code in terms of its length, size, and locality. Unlike the previous bounds, our bound follows from a significantly simple analysis and depends on the size of the alphabet being used. It turns out that the binary Simplex codes satisfy our bound with equality; hence, the Simplex codes are the first example of an optimal binary locally repairable code family. We also provide achievability results based on random coding and concatenated codes that are numerically verified to be close to our bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]