Nonlinearity and Kernel of Z-Linear Simplex and MacDonald Codes.

$\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -additive codes are subgroups of $\mathbb {Z}^{n}_{2^{s}}$ , and can be seen as a generalization of linear codes over $\mathbb {Z}_{2}$ and $\mathbb {Z}_{4}$. A $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -linear code is a binary code (not necessarily linear) which is the Gray map image of a $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -additive code. We consider $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -additive simplex codes of type $\alpha $ and $\beta $ , which are a generalization over $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ of the binary simplex codes. These codes are related to the $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -additive Hadamard codes. In this paper, we use this relationship to find a linear subcode of the corresponding $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -linear codes, called kernel, and a representation of these codes as cosets of this kernel. In particular, this also gives the linearity of these codes. Similarly, $\mathbb {Z}_{2^{s}}$ -additive MacDonald codes are defined for $s>2$ , and equivalent results are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]