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As a special subclass of cyclic codes, BCH codes have wide applications in communication and storage systems. A BCH code of length $n$ over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ is always relative to an $n$ -th primitive root of unity $\beta $ in an extension field of $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ , and is called a dually-BCH code if its dual is also a BCH code relative to the same $\beta $. The question as to whether a BCH code is a dually-BCH code is in general very hard to answer. In this paper, an answer to this question for primitive narrow-sense BCH codes and projective narrow-sense ternary BCH codes is given. Sufficient and necessary conditions in terms of the designed distances $\delta $ will be presented to ensure that these BCH codes are dually-BCH codes. In addition, the parameters of the primitive narrow-sense BCH codes and their dual codes are investigated. Some lower bounds on minimum distances of the dual codes of primitive and projective narrow-sense BCH codes are developed. Especially for binary primitive narrow-sense BCH codes, the new bounds on the minimum distances of the dual codes improve the classical Sidel’nikov bound, and are also better than the Carlitz and Uchiyama bound for large designed distances $\delta $. The question as to what subclasses of cyclic codes are BCH codes is also answered to some extent. As a byproduct, the parameters of some subclasses of cyclic codes are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the transmission of an infinite sequence of messages (a streaming source) over a packet erasure channel, where every source message must be recovered perfectly at the destination subject to a fixed decoding delay. While the capacity of a channel that introduces only bursts of erasures has been known for more than fifteen years, only recently, the capacity of a channel with either one burst of erasures or multiple arbitrary erasures in any fixed-sized sliding window has been established. However, explicit codes shown to achieve this capacity for any admissible set of parameters require a large field size that scales exponentially with the delay. Recently, it has been shown that there exist codes that achieve the capacity with field size which scales quadratically with the delay. However, explicit constructions were shown only to specific combinations of parameters. This work describes an explicit rate-optimal construction for all admissible channel and delay parameters over a field size that scales quadratically with the delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ovoids in ${\mathrm {PG}}(3, {\mathrm {GF}}(q))$ have been an interesting topic in coding theory, combinatorics, and finite geometry for a long time. So far only two families of ovoids are known. The first is the elliptic quadrics and the second is the Tits ovoids. It is known that an ovoid in ${\mathrm {PG}}(3, {\mathrm {GF}}(q))$ corresponds to a $[q^{2}+1, 4, q^{2}-q]$ code over ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ , which is called an ovoid code. The objectives of this paper are to develop the general theories of subfield codes and to study the subfield codes of the two families of ovoid codes. The dimensions, minimum weights, and the weight distributions of the subfield codes of the elliptic quadric codes and Tits ovoid codes are settled. The parameters of the duals of these subfield codes are also studied. Some of the codes presented in this paper are optimal, and some are distance-optimal. The parameters of the subfield codes are new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algorithms for secure encryption in a post-quantum world are currently receiving a lot of attention in the research community. One of the most promising such algorithms is the code-based scheme called QC-MDPC, which has excellent performance and a small public key size. In this paper, we present a very efficient key recovery attack on the QC-MDPC scheme using the fact that decryption uses an iterative decoding step, and this can fail with some small probability. We identify a dependence between the secret key and the failure in decoding. This can be used to build what we refer to as a distance spectrum for the secret key, which is the set of all distances between any two ones in the secret key. In a reconstruction step, we then determine the secret key from the distance spectrum. The attack has been implemented and tested on a proposed instance of QC-MDPC for 80-bit security. It successfully recovers the secret key in minutes. A slightly modified version of the attack can be applied on proposed versions of the QC-MDPC scheme that provides IND-CCA security. The attack is a bit more complex in this case, but still very much below the security level. The reason why we can break schemes with proved CCA security is that the model for these proofs typically does not include the decoding error possibility. At last, we present several algorithms for key reconstruction from an empirical distance spectrum. We first improve the naïve algorithm for key reconstruction by a factor of about 3 0000, when the parameters for 80-bit security are implemented. We further develop the algorithm to deal with errors in the distance spectrum. This ultimately reduces the requirement on the number of ciphertexts that need to be collected for a successful key recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear complementary dual (LCD) cyclic codes were referred historically to as reversible cyclic codes, which had applications in data storage. Due to a newly discovered application in cryptography, there has been renewed interest in LCD codes. In particular, it has been shown that binary LCD codes play an important role in implementations against side-channel attacks and fault injection attacks. In this paper, we first present a new characterization of binary LCD codes in terms of their orthogonal or symplectic basis. Using such a characterization, we solve a conjecture proposed by Galvez et al. on the minimum distance of binary LCD codes. Next, we consider the action of the orthogonal group on the set of all LCD codes, determine all possible orbits of this action, derive simple closed formulas of the size of the orbits, and present some asymptotic results on the size of the corresponding orbits. Our results show that almost all binary LCD codes are odd-like codes with odd-like duals, and about half of $q$ -ary LCD codes have orthonormal basis, where $q$ is a power of an odd prime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A class of cyclic codes has recently been decoded by using the weak-locator polynomials instead of the conventional error-locator polynomials. In this paper, a generalization of weak-locator polynomials to the multivariate cases, called the multivariate weak-locator polynomials, is defined, and a new matrix whose determinant can be expressed as a multivariate weak-locator polynomial is developed for cyclic codes. Moreover, a modified matrix along with Gaussian elimination found herein enables one to determine error positions precisely. The presented matrices result in a reduction of the number of syndromes when compared with the previously known matrices. The simulation shows that, for example, with the capability of correcting more errors, a considerably sophistical scheme of decoding the (97, 49, 15) binary cyclic code based on the proposed matrices is around 115 times faster than other existing decoders. Therefore, in general, it is developed to facilitate faster decoding of a large class of cyclic codes and is naturally suitable for the software implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the Guruswami-Sudan (GS) list decoding algorithm for one-point elliptic codes, in which the interpolation is realized by the module basis reduction (BR). Elliptic codes are a kind of algebraic-geometric (AG) codes with a genus of one. Over the same finite field, they have a greater codeword length than Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, capable of correcting more errors. The GS decoding consists of interpolation and root-finding, while the former that determines the interpolation polynomial $\mathcal {Q}(\text {x}, \text {y}, \text {z})$ dominates the decoding complexity. By defining the Lagrange interpolation function over an elliptic function field, a basis of the interpolation module can be constructed. The desired Gröbner basis that contains $\mathcal {Q}(\text {x}, \text {y}, \text {z})$ can be determined by reducing the constructed basis. This is namely the BR interpolation and it requires less finite field arithmetic operations than the conventional Kötter’s interpolation, facilitating the GS decoding. Re-encoding transform (ReT) is further introduced to facilitate the BR interpolation. This work also shows that both the BR interpolation and its ReT variant will have a lower complexity as the code rate ${k}/{n}$ increases, where n and ${k}$ are the length and dimension of the code, respectively. Our numerical results demonstrate the complexity advantage of the BR interpolation over Kötter’s interpolation, and the performance advantage of elliptic codes over RS codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Goppa code over $\Bbb F_{q^{m}}$ is a well-known subclass of algebraic error-correcting code. If $m=1$ , then it is a generalized Reed-Solomon(GRS) code and its dual code is called a GRS code via a Goppa code. In this paper, we give a necessary and sufficient condition that the dual codes of GRS codes via (expurgated) Goppa codes are also GRS codes via Goppa codes. Under the above condition, we show that the hulls of GRS codes via Goppa codes are still GRS codes via Goppa codes. As an application, we characterize LCD GRS codes and self-dual GRS codes under the above condition. Some numerical examples are also presented to illustrate our main results. Moreover, we also apply our result to entanglement-assisted quantum error correcting codes (EAQECCs) and obtain two new families of MDS EAQECCs with arbitrary parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discover that univariate form of a Niho bent function is a sum of functions having the form of a Leander–Kholosha bent function taken with particular coefficients from \mathbb F2^{n}^{*} for every term. We know that the Niho bent functions are related to o-polynomials. The power terms in the univariate Niho bent function can be derived by working, in a first step, on each monomial of the corresponding o-polynomial separately, and in a second step, adding them to obtain the global expression. This allows, knowing the monomials in an o-polynomial, to obtain the power terms of the polynomial representing corresponding bent function. However, the coefficients are not calculated explicitly. The explicit form is given for the bent functions obtained from quadratic and cubic o-polynomials. We also calculate the algebraic degree of any bent function in the Leander–Kholosha class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a linear code, deep holes are defined to be vectors that are further away from codewords than all other vectors. The problem of deciding whether a received word is a deep hole for generalized Reed–Solomon (GRS) codes is proved to be co-NP-complete by Guruswami and Vardy. For the extended Reed–Solomon codes RSq( \mathbb {F}q,k) , a conjecture was made to classify deep holes by Cheng and Murray. Since then efforts have been made to prove the conjecture, or its various forms. In this paper, we classify deep holes completely for GRS codes RSp (D,k) , where $p$ is a prime, |D| > k \geqslant ({p-1})/{2} . Our techniques are built on the idea of deep hole trees, and several results concerning the Erdös–Heilbronn conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we address the computational hardness of optimally decoding a quantum stabilizer code. Much like classical linear codes, errors are detected by measuring certain check operators which yield an error syndrome, and the decoding problem consists of determining the most likely recovery given the syndrome. The corresponding classical problem is known to be NP-complete, and are appropriate a similar decoding problem for quantum codes is also known to be NP-complete. However, this decoding strategy is not optimal in the quantum setting as it does not consider error degeneracy, which causes distinct errors to have the same effect on the code. Here, we show that optimal decoding of stabilizer codes (previously known to be NP-hard) is in fact computationally much harder than optimal decoding of classical linear codes, it is #P-complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide two complementary results for cyclic codes of composite length. First, we give a general construction of cyclic codes of length nr from cyclic codes of length n and a lower bound on the minimum distance. Numerical data show that many cyclic codes of composite length with the best parameters can be obtained in this way. Second, in the other direction, we show that for cyclic codes of length n with a primitive n-th root of unity as a non-zero, the minimum distance is roughly bounded by the square-free part of n. This means that we shall not expect good cyclic codes of length n in general if, for example, the length n is divisible by a high power of a prime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyclic codes are an interesting class of linear codes due to their efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. Bose-Ray-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes form a subclass of cyclic codes and are very important in both theory and practice as they have good error-correcting capability and are widely used in communication systems, storage devices, and consumer electronics. However, the dimension and minimum distance of BCH codes are not known in general. The objective of this paper is to determine the Bose and minimum distances of a class of narrow-sense primitive BCH codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear complementary-dual (LCD for short) codes are linear codes that intersect with their duals trivially. LCD codes have been used in certain communication systems. It is recently found that LCD codes can be applied in cryptography. This application of LCD codes renewed the interest in the construction of LCD codes having a large minimum distance. Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are optimal in the sense that the minimum distance cannot be improved for given length and code size. Constructing LCD MDS codes is thus of significance in theory and practice. Recently, Jin constructed several classes of LCD MDS codes through generalized Reed-Solomon codes. In this paper, a different approach is proposed to obtain new LCD MDS codes from generalized Reed-Solomon codes. Consequently, new code constructions are provided and certain previously known results by Jin are extended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an efficient decoding algorithm is developed to facilitate faster decoding of the binary systematic quadratic residue (QR) codes. It is based on the difference of syndromes (DS), and hence, is called the DS algorithm hereinafter. This new method combines the advantages of the syndrome-weight algorithm and properties of the cyclic codes. Actually, it is a natural generalization of the cyclic weight (CW) algorithm for the (47, 24, 11) QR code developed by Lin et al., and its validity of decoding any binary systematic QR code is also proved. The complexity analysis and simulation results show that the DS algorithm dramatically reduces the decoding complexity without performance loss and considerably requires less memory when compared with previous ones. Utilizing the (47, 24, 11), the (71, 36, 11), the (73, 37, 13), and the (89, 45, 17) QR codes as examples, the DS algorithm not only significantly improves the decoding efficiency, but also saves the memory evidently. When the (23, 12, 7) QR code is considered, the DS algorithm performs almost as well as the currently known best algorithm in terms of decoding efficiency and memory requirements. Thus, all QR codes of lengths less than 100 can be decoded efficiently by using the proposed algorithm. Especially, when the proposed algorithm is applied to decode the (89, 45, 17) QR code, the best one among all the QR codes of lengths less than 100, the decoding speed is raised 26 times and the memory is saved up to 76.6% in comparison with the existing fastest decoding algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducible codes for the rank metric were introduced for cryptographic purposes. They have fast encoding and decoding algorithms, include maximum rank distance (MRD) codes, and can correct many rank errors beyond half of their minimum rank distance, which makes them suitable for error correction in network coding. In this paper, we study their security behavior against information leakage on networks when applied as coset coding schemes, giving the following main results: 1) we give lower and upper bounds on their generalized rank weights (GRWs), which measure worst case information leakage to the wire tapper; 2) we find new parameters for which these codes are MRD (meaning that their first GRW is optimal) and use the previous bounds to estimate their higher GRWs; 3) we show that all linear (over the extension field) codes, whose GRWs are all optimal for fixed packet and code sizes but varying length are reducible codes up to rank equivalence; and 4) we show that the information leaked to a wire tapper when using reducible codes is often much less than the worst case given by their (optimal in some cases) GRWs. We conclude with some secondary related properties: conditions to be rank equivalent to Cartesian products of linear codes and conditions to be rank degenerate, duality properties, and MRD ranks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper upper and lower bounds on the probability of decoding failure under maximum likelihood decoding are derived for different (nonbinary) Raptor code constructions. In particular four different constructions are considered; (i) the standard Raptor code construction, (ii) a multi-edge type construction, (iii) a construction where the Raptor code is nonbinary but the generator matrix of the LT code has only binary entries, (iv) a combination of (ii) and (iii). The latter construction resembles the one employed by RaptorQ codes, which at the time of writing this article represents the state of the art in fountain codes. The bounds are shown to be tight, and provide an important aid for the design of Raptor codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regenerating codes for distributed storage have attracted much research interest in the past decade. Such codes trade the bandwidth needed to repair a failed node with the overall amount of data stored in the network. Minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes are an important class of optimal regenerating codes that minimize (first) the amount of data stored per node and (then) the repair bandwidth. Specifically, an [n,k,d] - (\alpha ) MSR code \mathbb C over \smash \mathbb F\!q stores a file \mathcal F consisting of \alpha k symbols over \smash {\mathbb {F}_{\!q}} among n$ nodes, each storing \alpha $ symbols, in such a way that: 1) the file k$ of the n$ nodes and 2) the content of any failed node can be reconstructed by accessing any d$ of the remaining symbols from each of these nodes. In practice, the file \mathcal F is typically available in uncoded form on some $k$ of the $n$ nodes, known as systematic nodes, and the defining node-repair condition above can be relaxed to requiring the optimal repair bandwidth for systematic nodes only. Such codes are called systematic–repair MSR codes. Unfortunately, finite– $\alpha $ constructions of $[n,k,d]$ MSR codes are known only for certain special cases: either low rate, namely $k/n \leqslant 0.5$ , or high repair connectivity, namely $d = n-1$ . Our main result in this paper is a finite– $\alpha $ construction of systematic-repair $[n,k,d]$ MSR codes for all possible values of parameters $n,k,d$ . We also introduce a generalized construction for $[n,k]$ MSR codes to achieve the optimal repair bandwidth for all values of $d$ simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historically, LCD cyclic codes were referred to as reversible cyclic codes, which had applications in data storage. Due to a newly discovered application in cryptography, there has been renewed interest in LCD codes. In this paper, we explore two special families of LCD cyclic codes, which are both BCH codes. The dimensions and the minimum distances of these LCD BCH codes are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Locally Recoverable Code is a code such that the value of any single coordinate of a codeword can be recovered from the values of a small subset of other coordinates. When we have $\delta $ non-overlapping subsets of cardinality $r_{i}$ that can be used to recover the missing coordinate we say that a linear code $\mathcal {C}$ with length $n$ , dimension $k$ , minimum distance $d$ has $(r_{1},\ldots, r_\delta)$ -locality and denote by $[n, k, d; r_{1}, r_{2}, {\dots }, r_\delta]$. In this paper we provide a new upper bound for the minimum distance of these codes. Working with a finite number of subgroups of cardinality $r_{i}+1$ of the automorphism group of a function field $\mathcal {F}| \mathbb {F}_{q}$ of genus $g \geq 1$ we propose a construction of $[n, k, d; r_{1}, r_{2}, {\dots }, r_\delta]$ -codes and apply the results to some well known families of function fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of Generalized Hamming weights of block codes has been investigated since the nineties due to its significant role in coding theory and cryptography. In this paper we extend this concept to the context of convolutional codes. In particular, we focus on column distances and introduce the novel notion of generalized column distances (GCD). We first show that the hierarchy of GCD is strictly increasing. We then provide characterizations of such distances in terms of the truncated parity-check matrix of the code, that will allow us to determine their values. Finally, the case in which the parity-check matrix is in systematic form is treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-orthogonal codes are an interesting type of linear codes due to their wide applications in communication and cryptography. It is known that self-orthogonal codes are often used to construct quantum error-correcting codes, which can protect quantum information in quantum computations and quantum communications. Let $\mathcal C$ be an $[n, k]$ cyclic code over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ , where $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ is the finite field of order $q$. The hull of $\mathcal C$ is defined to be the intersection of the code and its dual. In this paper, we will employ the defining sets of cyclic codes to present two general characterizations of the hulls that have dimension $k-1$ or $k^\perp -1$ , where $k^\perp $ is the dimension of the dual code $\mathcal C^\perp $. Several sufficient and necessary conditions for primitive and projective BCH codes to have $(k-1)$ -dimensional (or $(k^\perp -1)$ -dimensional) hulls are also developed by presenting lower and upper bounds on their designed distances. Furthermore, several classes of self-orthogonal codes are proposed via the hulls of BCH codes and their parameters are also investigated. The dimensions and minimum distances of some self-orthogonal codes are determined explicitly. In addition, several optimal codes are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An $[{n}, {k}, {n}-{k}+1]$ linear code is called an MDS code. An $[{n}, {k}, {n}-{k}]$ linear code is said to be almost maximum distance separable (almost MDS or AMDS for short). A code is said to be near maximum distance separable (near MDS or NMDS for short) if the code and its dual code both are almost maximum distance separable. The first near MDS code was the [11, 6, 5] ternary Golay code discovered in 1949 by Golay. This ternary code holds 4-designs, and its extended code holds a Steiner system ${S}(5, 6, 12)$ with the largest strength known. In the past 70 years, sporadic near MDS codes holding t-designs were discovered and a lot of infinite families of near MDS codes over finite fields were constructed. However, the question as to whether there is an infinite family of near MDS codes holding an infinite family of t-designs for $ {t}\geq 2$ remains open for 70 years. This paper settles this long-standing problem by presenting an infinite family of near MDS codes over $ {GF}(3^{ {s}})$ holding an infinite family of 3-designs and an infinite family of near MDS codes over $ {GF}(2^{2 {s}})$ holding an infinite family of 2-designs. The subfield subcodes of these two families of codes are also studied, and are shown to be dimension-optimal or distance-optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The binary Hamming codes with parameters $[{2^{m}-1, 2^{m}-1-m, 3}]$ are perfect. Their extended codes have parameters $[{2^{m}, 2^{m}-1-m, 4}]$ and are distance-optimal. The first objective of this paper is to construct a class of binary linear codes with parameters $[{2^{m+s}+2^{s}-2^{m},2^{m+s}+2^{s}-2^{m}-2m-2,4}]$ , which have better information rates than the class of extended binary Hamming codes, and are also distance-optimal. The second objective is to construct a class of distance-optimal binary codes with parameters $[{2^{m}+2, 2^{m}-2m, 6}]$. Both classes of binary linear codes have new parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Maximum Distance Separable and Euclidean self-dual codes have theoretical and practical importance and the study of MDS self-dual codes has attracted lots of attention in recent years. In particular, determining the existence of q -ary MDS self-dual codes for various lengths has been investigated extensively. The problem is completely solved for the case where q is even. This paper focuses on the case where q is odd. We construct a few classes of new MDS self-dual codes through generalized Reed–Solomon codes. More precisely, we show that for any given even length n , we have a q and q is sufficiently large (say q\ge 4^{n}\times n^{2}) . Furthermore, we prove that there exists a q -ary MDS self-dual code of length n if q=r^{2} and n$ satisfies one of the three conditions: 1) n\le r$ and n$ is even; 2) q$ is odd and n-1$ is an odd divisor of and $n=2tr$ for any $t\le (r-1)/2$ . [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Petabyte-scale distributed storage systems are currently transitioning to erasure codes to achieve higher storage efficiency. Classical codes, such as Reed–Solomon (RS), are highly sub-optimal for distributed environments due to their high overhead during single-failure events. Locally repairable codes (LRCs) form a new family of codes that are repair efficient. In particular, LRCs minimize the number of nodes participating in single node repairs. Fundamental bounds and methods for explicitly constructing LRCs suitable for deployment in distributed storage clusters are not fully understood and currently form an active area of research. In this paper, we present an explicit LRC that is simple to construct and is optimal for a specific set of coding parameters. Our construction is based on grouping RS symbols and then adding extra simple parities that allow for small repair locality. For the analysis of the optimality of the code, we derive a new result on the matroid represented by the code’s generator matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers a linear quasi-cyclic product code of two given quasi-cyclic codes of relatively prime lengths over finite fields. We give the spectral analysis of a quasi-cyclic product code in terms of the spectral analysis of the row and column codes. Moreover, we provide a new lower bound on the minimum Hamming distance of a given quasi-cyclic code and present a new algebraic decoding algorithm. More specifically, we prove an explicit (unreduced) basis of an \ell A {\ell B} -quasi-cyclic product code in terms of the generator matrix in reduced Gröbner basis with respect to the position-over-term (RGB/POT) order form of the \ell A -quasi-cyclic row code and the \ell B -quasi-cyclic column code, respectively. This generalizes the work of Burton and Weldon for the generator polynomial of a cyclic product code (where \ell A= {\ell B}=1 ). Furthermore, we derive the generator matrix in Pre-RGB/POT form of an \ell A {\ell B} -quasi-cyclic product code for two special cases: i) for \ell A=2 and \ell B=1 and ii) if the row code is a one-level \ell A -quasi-cyclic code (for arbitrary \ell A ) and \ell B=1 . For arbitrary \ell A and \ell B , the Pre-RGB/POT form of the generator matrix of an \ell A {\ell B} -quasi-cyclic product code is conjectured. The spectral analysis is applied to the generator matrix of the product of an \ell -quasi-cyclic and a cyclic code, and we propose a new lower bound on the minimum Hamming distance of a given \ell -quasi-cyclic code. In addition, we develop an efficient syndrome-based decoding algorithm for \ell -phased burst errors with guaranteed decoding radius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the unequal error protection (UEP) capability of convolutional encoders, in terms of the separation vector, is studied from an algebraic viewpoint. A simple procedure is presented for constructing a generator matrix, which is basic and has the largest separation vector for every convolutional code. Such a generator matrix would be desirable, since the corresponding encoder not only achieves UEP optimality, but also avoids undesired catastrophic error propagation. In addition, canonical generator matrices, which are both basic and reduced, are even more preferable for encoding, since they attain the lowest complexity for Viterbi decoding. However, the direct transformation from a UEP-optimal generator matrix to a canonical generator matrix may come with an unexpected loss of the separation vector. We also propose a specific type of transformation matrix that reduces the external degrees of the generator matrices, from which canonical generator matrices can be constructed that include the mitigated degradation of the separation vector. Finally, beneficial UEP convolutional codes that achieve the maximum free distances for the given code parameters are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

All correlation measures, classical and quantum, must be monotonic under local operations. In this paper, we characterize monotonic formulas that are linear combinations of the von Neumann entropies associated with the quantum state of a physical system that has $n$ parts. We show that these formulas form a polyhedral convex cone, which we call the monotonicity cone, and enumerate its facets. We illustrate its structure and prove that it is equivalent to the cone of monotonic formulas implied by strong subadditivity. We explicitly compute its extremal rays for ${n} \leq5$. We also consider the symmetric monotonicity cone, in which the formulas are required to be invariant under subsystem permutations. We describe this cone fully for all $n$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, locally repairable codes which have optimal minimum Hamming distance with respect to the bound presented by Prakash et al. are considered. New upper bounds on the length of such optimal codes are derived. The new bounds apply to more general cases, and have weaker requirements compared with the known ones. In this sense, they both improve and generalize previously known bounds. Further, optimal codes are constructed, whose length is order-optimal with respect to the new upper bounds. Notably, the length of the codes is super-linear in the alphabet size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gabidulin codes are the first general construction of linear codes that are maximum rank distant (MRD). They have found applications in linear network coding, for example, when the transmitter and receiver are oblivious to the inner workings and topology of the network (the so-called incoherent regime). The reason is that Gabidulin codes can be used to map information to linear subspaces, which in the absence of errors cannot be altered by linear operations, and in the presence of errors can be corrected if the subspace is perturbed by a small rank. Furthermore, in distributed coding and distributed systems, one is led to the design of error correcting codes whose generator matrix must satisfy a given support constraint. In this paper, we give necessary and sufficient conditions on the support of the generator matrix that guarantees the existence of Gabidulin codes and general MRD codes. When the rate of the code is not very high, this is achieved with the same field size necessary for Gabidulin codes with no support constraint. When these conditions are not satisfied, we characterize the largest possible rank distance under the support constraints and show that they can be achieved by subcodes of Gabidulin codes. The necessary and sufficient conditions are identical to those that appear for MDS codes which were recently proven by Yildiz et al. and Lovett in the context of settling the GM-MDS conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimal linear codes have significant applications in secret sharing schemes and secure two-party computation. There are several methods to construct linear codes, one of which is based on functions over finite fields. Recently, many construction methods for linear codes from functions have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we generalize the recent construction methods given by Tang et al. in [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 62(3), 1166-1176, 2016] to weakly regular plateaued functions over finite fields of odd characteristic. We first construct three-weight linear codes from weakly regular plateaued functions based on the second generic construction and then determine their weight distributions. We also give a punctured version and subcode of each constructed code. We note that they may be (almost) optimal codes and can be directly employed to obtain (democratic) secret sharing schemes, which have diverse applications in the industry. We next observe that the constructed codes are minimal for almost all cases and finally describe the access structures of the secret sharing schemes based on their dual codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent development by Padakandla and Pradhan, and by Lim, Feng, Pastore, Nazer, and Gastpar, this paper studies the potential of structured coset coding as a complete replacement for random coding in network information theory. The roles of two techniques used in coset coding to generate nonuniform codewords, namely, shaping and channel transformation, are clarified and illustrated via the simple example of the two-sender multiple access channel. While individually deficient, the optimal combination of shaping via nested coset codes of the same generator matrix (which we refer to as homologous codes) and channel transformation is shown to achieve the same performance as traditional random codes for the general two-sender multiple access channel. The achievability proof of the capacity region is extended to multiple access channels with more than two senders, and with one or more receivers. A quantization argument adapted to the proposed combination of two techniques is presented to establish the achievability proof for their Gaussian counterparts. It is illustrated by an example that combining shaping and channel transformation is useful even when the goal of transmission for a subset of the receivers is to recover a linear combination of messages. These results open up new possibilities of utilizing homologous codes for a broader class of applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discrete Fourier transform test is a randomness test included in NIST SP800-22. However, the variance of the test statistic is smaller than expected and the theoretical value of the variance is not known. Hitherto, the mechanism explaining why the former variance is smaller than expected has been qualitatively explained based on Parseval’s theorem. In this paper, we explore this quantitatively and derive the variance using Parseval’s theorem under particular assumptions. Numerical experiments are then used to show that this derived variance is robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an important task to construct quantum maximum-distance-separable (MDS) codes with good parameters. In the present paper, we provide six new classes of $q$ -ary quantum MDS codes by using generalized Reed–Solomon (GRS) codes and Hermitian construction. The minimum distances of our quantum MDS codes can be larger than $\frac {q}{2}+1$. Three of these six classes of quantum MDS codes have longer lengths than the ones constructed in and , hence some of their results can be easily derived from ours via the propagation rule. Moreover, some known quantum MDS codes of specific lengths can be seen as special cases of ours and the minimum distances of some known quantum MDS codes are also improved as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generalized Hamming weights (GHWs) of linear codes are fundamental parameters, the knowledge of which is of great interest in many applications. However, to determine the GHWs of linear codes is difficult in general. In this paper, we study the GHWs for a family of reducible cyclic codes and obtain the complete weight hierarchy in several cases. This is achieved by extending the idea of Yang et al. into higher dimension and by employing some interesting combinatorial arguments. It shall be noted that these cyclic codes may have arbitrary number of nonzeros. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces the covering dimension of a linear code over a finite field, which is analogous to the critical exponent of a representable matroid and, thus, generalizes invariants that lie at the heart of several fundamental problems in a coding theory. An upper bound on the covering dimension is proved, improving Kung’s classical bound for the critical exponent. In addition, a construction is given for linear codes that attain equality in this covering dimension bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new way of providing cyclic structures to convolutional codes. We define the skew cyclic convolutional codes as left ideals of a quotient ring of a suitable non-commutative polynomial ring. In contrast to the previous approaches to cyclicity for convolutional codes, we use Ore polynomials with coefficients in a field (the rational function field over a finite field), so their arithmetic is very well known and we may proceed similarly to cyclic block codes. In particular, we show how to obtain easily skew cyclic convolutional codes of a given dimension, and we compute an idempotent generator of the code and its dual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a new transform on Boolean functions generalizing the Walsh–Hadamard transform. For Boolean functions $q$ and $f$ , the $q$ -transform of $f$ measures the proximity of $f$ to the set of functions obtained from $q$ by change of basis. This has implications for security against certain algebraic attacks. In this paper, we derive the expected value and second moment (Parseval’s equation) of the $q$ -transform, leading to a notion of $q$ -bentness. We also develop a Poisson summation formula, which leads to a proof that the $q$ -transform is invertible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constacyclic codes which generalize the classical cyclic codes have played important roles in recent constructions of many new quantum maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. However, the mathematical mechanism may not have been fully understood. In this paper, we use pseudo-cyclic codes, which is a further generalization of constacyclic codes, to construct the quantum MDS codes. We can not only provide a unified explanation of many previous constructions, but also produce some new quantum MDS codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance in a sampling theory of U -invariant subspaces of a Hilbert space \mathcal {H} , where U denotes a unitary operator on \mathcal H , is nowadays a recognized fact. Indeed, shift-invariant subspaces of L^2(\mathbb R) become a particular example; periodic extensions of finite signals also provide a remarkable example. As a consequence, the availability of an abstract $U$ -sampling theory becomes a useful tool to handle these problems. In this paper, we derive a sampling theory for finite dimensional multiple generated $U$ -invariant subspaces of a Hilbert space \mathcal {H} . As the involved samples are identified as frame coefficients in a suitable euclidean space, the relevant mathematical technique is that of the finite frame theory. Since finite frames are nothing but spanning sets of vectors, the used technique naturally meets matrix analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, locally repairable codes with all-symbol locality are studied. Methods to modify already existing codes are presented. It is also shown that, with high probability, a random matrix with a few extra columns guaranteeing the locality property is a generator matrix for a locally repairable code with a good minimum distance. The proof of the result provides a constructive method to find locally repairable codes. Finally, constructions of three infinite classes of optimal vector-linear locally repairable codes over a small alphabet independent of the code size are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interference networks with no channel state information at the transmitter except for the knowledge of the connectivity graph have been recently studied under the topological interference management framework. In this paper, we consider a similar problem with topological knowledge but in a distributed broadcast channel setting, i.e., a network where transmitter cooperation is enabled. We show that the topological information can also be exploited in this case to strictly improve the degrees of freedom (DoF) as long as the network is not fully connected, which is a reasonable assumption in practice. Achievability schemes from graph theoretic and interference alignment perspectives are proposed. Together with outer bounds built upon generator sequence, the concept of compound channel settings, and the relation to index coding, we characterize the symmetric DoF for the so-called regular networks with constant number of interfering links, and identify the sufficient and/or necessary conditions for the arbitrary network topologies to achieve a certain amount of symmetric DoF. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, symbol-pair codes are proposed to protect against pair errors in symbol-pair read channels. One main task in symbol-pair coding theory is to design codes with large minimum pair distance. Maximum distance separable (MDS) symbol-pair codes are optimal in the sense they attain maximal minimum pair distance. In this paper, based on constacyclic codes, we construct some new MDS symbol-pair codes with minimum pair-distance five and six. Compared with classical $q$ -ary MDS codes, the constructed MDS symbol-pair codes have length up to q^{2}+q+1 . [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quantum maximum-distance-separable (MDS) codes form an important family of quantum codes. In this paper, using Hermitian construction and classical constacyclic codes, we construct six classes of quantum MDS codes. Two of these six classes of quantum MDS codes have larger minimum distance than the ones available in the literature. Most of these quantum MDS codes are new in the sense that their parameters are not covered by the codes available in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BCH codes are an interesting type of cyclic codes and have wide applications in communication and storage systems. Generally, it is very hard to determine the minimum distances of BCH codes. In this paper, we determine the weight distributions of two classes of primitive BCH codes $\mathcal C_{(q, m, \delta _{2})}$ and $\mathcal C_{(q, m, \delta _{3})}$ and their extended codes, which solve two problems proposed by Ding et al. It is shown that the extended codes $\overline {\mathcal C}_{(q, m, \delta _{2})}$ have four nonzero weights. We also employ the Hartmann-Tzeng bound to present the minimum distance of the dual code $\mathcal C_{(q, m, \delta _{2})}^\perp $ for $q \ge 5$. Inspired by the idea, we then determine the dimensions of a class of cyclic codes and give lower bounds on their minimum distances, which is greatly improved comparing with the BCH bound. Some optimal codes are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A ${\mathbb {Z}}_{2}{\mathbb {Z}}_{4}$ -additive code ${\mathcal{ C}}\subseteq {\mathbb {Z}}_{2}^\alpha \times {\mathbb {Z}}_{4}^\beta $ is called cyclic if the set of coordinates can be partitioned into two subsets, the set of ${\mathbb {Z}}_{2}$ coordinates and the set of ${\mathbb {Z}}_{4}$ coordinates, such that any cyclic shift of the coordinates of both subsets leaves the code invariant. Let $\Phi ({\mathcal{ C}})$ be the binary Gray map image of ${\mathcal{ C}}$. We study the rank and the dimension of the kernel of a ${\mathbb {Z}}_{2} {\mathbb {Z}}_{4} $ -additive cyclic code ${\mathcal{ C}}$ , that is, the dimensions of the binary linear codes $\langle \Phi ({\mathcal{ C}}) \rangle $ and $\ker (\Phi ({\mathcal{ C}}))$. We give upper and lower bounds for these parameters. It is known that the codes $\langle \Phi ({\mathcal{ C}}) \rangle $ and $\ker (\Phi ({\mathcal{ C}}))$ are binary images of ${\mathbb {Z}}_{2} {\mathbb {Z}}_{4}$ -additive codes that we denote by ${\mathcal{ R}}({\mathcal{ C}})$ and ${\mathcal{ K}}({\mathcal{ C}})$ , respectively. Moreover, we show that ${\mathcal{ R}}({\mathcal{ C}})$ and ${\mathcal{ K}}({\mathcal{ C}})$ are also cyclic and determine the generator polynomials of these codes in terms of the generator polynomials of the code ${\mathcal{ C}}$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a new class of evaluation linear codes by evaluating polynomials at the roots of a suitable trace function. We give conditions for self-orthogonality of these codes and their subfield-subcodes with respect to the Hermitian inner product. They allow us to construct stabilizer quantum codes over several finite fields which substantially improve the codes in the literature. For the binary case, we obtain records at http://codetables.de/. Moreover, we obtain several classical linear codes over the field $\mathbb {F}_{4}$ which are records at http://codetables.de/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the problem of constructing balanced generator matrices for Reed–Solomon and Tamo–Barg codes. More specifically, we are interested in realizing generator matrices, for the full-length cyclic versions of these codes, where all rows have the same weight and the difference in weight between any columns is at most one. The results presented in this paper translate to computationally balanced encoding schemes, which can be appealing in distributed storage applications. Indeed, the balancedness of these generator matrices guarantees that the computation effort exerted by any storage node is essentially the same. In general, the framework presented can accommodate various values for the required row weight. We emphasize the possibility of constructing sparsest and balanced generator matrices for Reed–Solomon codes, i.e., each row is a minimum distance codeword. The number of storage nodes contacted once a message symbol is updated decreases with the row weight, so sparse constructions are appealing in that context. Results of similar flavor are presented for cyclic Tamo–Barg codes. In particular, we show that for a code with minimum distance $d$ and locality $r$ , a construction in which every row is of weight $d + r - 1$ is possible. The constructions presented are deterministic and operate over the codes’ original underlying finite field. As a result, efficient decoding from both errors and erasures is possible thanks to the plethora of efficient decoders available for the codes considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]