The trace codes of several classes of linear codes.

Recently, the research of trace codes over finite fields has received a lot of attention because some of these codes have good parameters. In this paper, we construct several classes of trace codes from some special classes of linear codes and give their weight distributions, showing that they contain some optimal and almost optimal codes. Furthermore, we determine the parameters of the duals of the trace codes, and show that they are distance-optimal or nearly distance-optimal with respect to the sphere-packing bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]