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In this work, we analyze the problem of catastrophicity of encoders of convolutional codes over the Laurent series with coefficients in ℤ p r , ℤ p r ((d)). Kuijper and Pinto proved in [M. Kuijper and R. Pinto, On minimality of convolutional ring encoders, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control55(11) (2009) 4890–4897] that, contrary to what happens for codes over ((d)) , where is a field, when dealing with ℤ p r ((d)) there are convolutional codes that do not admit non-catastrophic encoders. Nevertheless it was conjectured that any catastrophic convolutional code admits another type of non-catastrophic encoder called p -encoder. In this paper we solve this conjecture for a class of (2 , 1) convolutional codes over ℤ p 2 and show that, in fact, these codes always admit a non-catastrophic p-encoder. We also describe a constructive procedure that allows us to obtain a non-catastrophic p -encoder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maximum distance separable convolutional codes are characterized by the property that the free distance reaches the generalized Singleton bound, which makes them optimal for error correction. However, the existing constructions of such codes are available over fields of large size. In this paper, we present the unique construction of MDS convolutional codes of rate 1 / 2 and degree 5 over the field 1 1 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noncatastrophic encoders are an important class of polynomial generator matrices of convolutional codes. When these polynomials have coefficients in a finite field, these encoders have been characterized as polynomial left prime matrices. In this paper, we study the notion of noncatastrophicity in the context of convolutional codes when the polynomial matrices have entries in the finite ring ℤ p r . In particular, we study the notion of zero left prime in order to fully characterize noncatastrophic encoders over the finite ring ℤ p r . The second part of the paper is devoted to investigate free and column distance of convolutional codes that are free finitely generated ℤ p r -modules. We introduce the notion of b -degree and provide new bounds on the free distances and column distance. We show that this class of convolutional codes is optimal with respect to the column distance and to the free distance if and only if its projection on ℤ p is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]