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The six infinite families of power APN functions are among the oldest known instances of APN functions, and it has been conjectured in 2000 that they exhaust all possible power APN functions. Another long-standing open problem is that of the Walsh spectrum of the Dobbertin power family, which is still unknown. Those of Kasami, Niho and Welch functions are known, but not the precise values of their Walsh transform, with rare exceptions. One promising approach that could lead to the resolution of these problems is to consider alternative representations of the functions in questions. We derive alternative representations for the infinite APN monomial families. We show how the Niho, Welch, and Dobbertin functions can be represented as the composition $x^{i} \circ x^{1/j}$ of two power functions, and prove that our representations are optimal, i.e. no two power functions of lesser algebraic degree can be used to represent the functions in this way. We investigate compositions $x^{i} \circ L \circ x^{1/j}$ for a linear polynomial $L$ , show how the Kasami functions in odd dimension can be expressed in this way with $i=j$ being a Gold exponent and compute all APN functions of this form for $n \le 9$ and for $L$ with binary coefficients, thereby showing that our theoretical constructions exhaust all possible cases. We present observations and data on power functions with exponent $\sum _{i = 1}^{k-1} 2^{2ni} - 1$ which generalize the inverse and Dobbertin families. We present data on the Walsh spectrum of the Dobbertin function for $n \le 35$ , and conjecture its exact form. As an application of our results, we determine the exact values of the Walsh transform of the Kasami function at all points of a special form. Computations performed for $n\leq 21$ show that these points cover about 2/3 of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost perfect nonlinear (APN) functions over fields of characteristic 2 play an important role in cryptography, coding theory and, more generally, mathematics and information theory. In this paper we deduce a new method for constructing APN functions by studying the isotopic equivalence, concept defined for quadratic planar functions in fields of odd characteristic. In particular, we construct a family of quadratic APN functions which provides a new example of an APN mapping over ${\mathbb F}_{2^{9}}$ and includes an example of another APN function $x^{9}+ \mathop {\mathrm {Tr}}\nolimits (x^{3})$ over ${\mathbb F}_{2^{8}}$ , known since 2006 and not classified up to now. We conjecture that the conditions for this family are satisfied by infinitely many APN functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Index coding is a source coding problem in which a broadcaster seeks to meet the different demands of several users, each of whom is assumed to have some prior information on the data held by the sender. A well-known application is satellite communications, as described in one of the earliest papers on the subject (Birk and Kol, 1998). It is readily seen that if the sender has knowledge of its clients’ requests and their side-information sets, then the number of packet transmissions required to satisfy all users’ demands can be greatly reduced if the data are encoded before sending. The collection of side-information indices as well as the indices of the requested data is described as an instance \mathcal I of the index coding with side-information (ICSI) problem. The encoding function is called the index code of $ \mathcal I$ , and the number of transmissions, resulting from the encoding is referred to as its length. The main ICSI problem is to determine the optimal length of an index code and instance $ \mathcal I$ . As this number is hard to compute, bounds approximating it are sought, as are algorithms to compute efficient index codes. These questions have been addressed by several authors (e.g., see Alon et al. 2008, Bar-Yossef et al. 2011, Blasiak et al. 2013), often taking a graph-theoretic approach. Two interesting generalizations of the problem that have appeared in the literature are the subject of this paper. The first of these is the case of index coding with coded side information (Dai et al. 2014), in which linear combinations of the source data are both requested by and held as users’ side-information. This generalization has applications, for example, to relay channels and necessitates algebraic rather than combinatorial methods. The second is the introduction of error-correction in the problem, in which the broadcast channel is subject to noise (Dau et al. 2013). In this paper, we characterize the optimal length of a scalar or vector linear index code with coded side information (ICCSI) over a finite field in terms of a generalized min-rank and give bounds on this number based on constructions of random codes for an arbitrary instance. We furthermore consider the length of an optimal $\delta $ -error correcting code for an instance of the ICCSI problem and obtain bounds analogous to those described in (Dau et al. 2013), both for the Hamming metric and for rank-metric errors. We describe decoding algorithms for both categories of errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some new results on Generalized Algebraic Geometric (GAG) codes are obtained. First, we provide some constructions which significantly improve the general lower bounds on the minimum distance of a GAG code. GAG codes associated to specific maximal curves over finite fields are then investigated. As a result, 2895 improvements on MinT's tables message="AS PER IEEE STYLE, REFERENCES ARE REMOVED FROM THE ABSTRACT"/ are obtained. Finally, we construct asymptotically good GAG codes with better parameters with respect to those constructed by Spera in 2005. Maximal curves play a role in this context as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]