BCH Codes for the Rosenbloom–Tsfasman Metric

The Rosenbloom–Tsfasman metric has attracted the attention of many researchers as a generalization of the Hamming metric that is relevant to practical problems. Codes for this metric were considered. In particular, Reed–Solomon codes were generalized to be compatible with this metric. In this paper, a generalization of BCH codes for the Rosenbloom–Tsfasman metric is proposed. This generalization is based on considering BCH codes as subfield subcodes of Reed–Solomon codes. By characterizing these subfield subcodes, an explicit construction of BCH codes for the Rosenbloom–Tsfasman metric is provided. Two important properties of Reed–Solomon codes and BCH codes for the Rosenbloom–Tsfasman metric are studied and compared with those for the Hamming metric. These properties are cyclic structure and duality. The approach is based on Galois-Fourier transforms associated with Hasse derivatives.