Explicit construction of codes on an asymptotically bad tower of function fields

Asymptotics for the genus and the number of rational places in towers of function fields over a finite field

We construct a sequence of one-point codes from a tower of function fields whose relative minimum distances have a positive limit. Our tower is characterized by principal divisors. We determine completely the minimum distance of the codes from the first field of our tower. These results extend those of Stichtenoth [IEEE Trans Inform Theory (1988), 34(15):1345---1348], Yang and Kumar [Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 1518, (1991), Springer-Verlag, Berlin Hidelberg New York, pp. 99---107], and Garcia [Comm. Algebra, 20(12): 3683---3689]. As an application, we show that the minimum distance corresponds to the Feng---Rao bound.

We present an explicit construction of linear-time encodable and decodable codes of rate r which can correct a fraction (1 —re)/2 of errors over an alphabet of constant size depending only on e, for every 0 r 0. The error-correction performance of these codes is optimal as seen by the Singleton bound (these are codes). Such near-MDS linear-time codes were known for the decoding from erasures [2]; our construction generalizes this to handle errors as well. Concatenating these codes with good, constant-sized binary codes gives a construction of linear-time binary codes which meet the so-called Zyablov bound. In a nutshell, our results match the performance of the previously known explicit constructions of codes that had polynomial time encoding and decoding, but in addition have linear time encoding and decoding algorithms.We also obtain some results for list decoding targeted at the situation when the fraction of errors is very large, namely (1—e) for an arbitrarily small constant e > 0. The previously known constructions of such codes of good rate over constant-sized alphabets either used algebraic-geometric codes and thus suffered from complicated constructions and slow decoding, or as in the recent work of the authors [9], had fast encoding/decoding, but suffered from an alphabet size that was exponential in 1/e. We present two constructions of such codes with rate close to Ω(e2) over an alphabet of size quasi-polynomial in 1/e. One of the constructions, at the expense of a slight worsening of the rate, can achieve an alphabet size which is polynomial in 1/e. It also yields constructions of codes for list decoding from erasures which achieve new trade-offs. In particular, we construct codes of rate close to the optimal Ω(e) rate which can be efficiently list decoded from a fraction (1—e) of erasures.

Our goal in this note is to give a number of examples of abelian varieties over function fields k(t) which have bounded ranks in towers of extensions such as k(t^{1/d}) for varying d. Along the way we prove some new results on Fermat curves which may be of independent interest.

In this paper we study general conditions to prove the infiniteness of the genus of certain towers of function fields over a perfect field. We show that many known examples of towers with infinite genus are particular cases of these conditions.

In this paper, a convenient set of functions is identified whose span includes all functions in a tower of function fields of Garcia and Stichtenoth that have poles only at the place at infinity. The latter set is of interest in the construction of long and efficient “one-point” AG codes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic behavior of automorphism groups of function fields when genus tends to infinity. Motivated by applications in coding and cryptography, we consider the maximum size of abelian subgroups of the automorphism group $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ in terms of genus ${g_F}$ for a function field $F$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. Although the whole group $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ could have size $\Omega({g_F}^4)$, the maximum size $m_F$ of abelian subgroups of the automorphism group $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ is upper bounded by $4g_F+4$ for $g_F\ge 2$. In the present paper, we study the asymptotic behavior of $m_F$ by defining $M_q=\limsup_{{g_F}\rightarrow\infty}\frac{m_F \cdot \log_q m_F}{{g_F}}$, where $F$ runs through all function fields over $\mathbb{F}_q$. We show that $M_q$ lies between $2$ and $3$ (or $4$) for odd characteristic (or for even characteristic, respectively). This means that $m_F$ grows much more slowly than genus does asymptotically. The second part of this paper is to study the maximum size $b_F$ of subgroups of $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ whose order is coprime to $q$. The Hurwitz bound gives an upper bound $b_F\le 84(g_F-1)$ for every function field $F/\mathbb{F}_q$ of genus $g_F\ge 2$. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of $b_F$ by defining ${B_q}=\limsup_{{g_F}\rightarrow\infty}\frac{b_F}{{g_F}}$, where $F$ runs through all function fields over $\mathbb{F}_q$. Although the Hurwitz bound shows ${B_q}\le 84$, there are no lower bounds on $B_q$ in literature. One does not even know if ${B_q}=0$. For the first time, we show that ${B_q}\ge 2/3$ by explicitly constructing some towers of function fields in this paper.

On the Asymptotic Behaviour of Some Towers of Function Fields over Finite Fields

In this paper we study the problem of constructing non-trivial subtowers and supertowers of recursive towers of function fields over finite fields.

In this paper, we extend the notion of locally recoverable codes with availability to secret sharing schemes. The main problem that we considered is how to store information using locally recoverable codes with all symbol locality and availability in such way that useful information can be recovered using an only small subset of coordinates while a user who observes less than a certain number of coordinates does not get any information. In other words, we have to protect locally recoverable codes with availability over passive eavesdropper that can observe only limited number of coordinates. Upper bounds on number of bits that can be securely stored in such systems together with explicit constructions of codes with such a property are proposed.

We investigate the distance properties of linear locally recoverable codes (LRC codes) with all-symbol locality and availability. New upper and lower bounds on the minimum distance of such codes are derived. The upper bound is based on the shortening method and generalized Hamming weights that are fundamental parameters of any linear codes with many useful applications. This bound improves existing upper bounds. To reduce the gap in between upper and lower bounds, we do not restrict the alphabet size and propose explicit constructions of codes with locality and availability via rank-metric codes. The first construction relies on expander graphs and is better in low rate region. The second construction utilizes the LRC codes developed by Wang et al. as inner codes and is better in high rate region. We also suggest one possible generalization of LRC codes in which the recovering sets can intersect in a small number of coordinates. This feature allows us to increase the achievable code rate and still meet load balancing requirements. We derive upper and lower bounds on the parameters of such codes and present explicit constructions of codes with such a property.

Korchmaros and Nagy [Hermitian codes from higher degree places. J Pure Appl Algebra, doi: 10. 1016/j.jpaa.2013.04.002, 2013] computed the Weierstrass gap sequence G(P) of the Hermitian function field F q 2 ( H ) at any place P of degree 3, and obtained an explicit formula of the Matthews-Michel lower bound on the minimum distance in the associated differential Hermitian code C Ω ( D,mP ) where the divisor D is, as usual, the sum of all but one 1-degree F q 2 -rational places of F q 2 ( H ) and m is a positive integer. For plenty of values of m depending on q , this provided improvements on the designed minimum distance of C Ω ( D,mP ). Further improvements from G(P) were obtained by Korchmaros and Nagy relying on algebraic geometry. Here slightly weaker improvements are obtained from G(P) with the usual function-field method depending on linear series, Riemann-Roch theorem and Weierstrass semigroups. We also survey the known results on this subject.

The design of space-time codes for frequency flat, spatially correlated MIMO fading channels is considered. The focus of the paper is on the class of space-time block codes known as linear dispersion (LD) codes, introduced by Hassibi and Hochwald. The LD codes are optimized with respect to the mutual information between the inputs to the space-time encoder and the output of the channel. The use of the mutual information as both a design criterion and a performance measure is justified by allowing soft decisions at the output of the space-time decoder. A spatial Fourier (virtual) representation of the channel is exploited to allow for the analysis of MIMO channels with quite general fading statistics. Conditions, known as generalized orthogonality conditions (GOC), are derived for an LD code to achieve an upper bound on the mutual information, with the understanding that LD codes that achieve the upper bound, if they exist, are optimal. Explicit code constructions and properties of the optimal power allocation schemes are also derived. In particular, it is shown that optimal LD codes correspond to beamforming to a single virtual transmit angle at low SNR, and a necessary and sufficient condition for beamforming to be optimal is provided. Finally, numerical results are provided to illustrate the optimal code design for two examples of sparse scattering environments. The performance of the optimal LD codes for these scattering environments is compared with that of LD codes designed assuming the i.i.d. Rayleigh (rich scattering) model, and it is shown that the optimal LD codes perform significantly better. The optimal LD codes are also compared to beamforming LD codes and it is shown that beamforming is nearly optimal over a range of SNR's of interest.

The aim of this paper is to show the connection between certain, previously constructed multi-block and asymmetric space-time codes. The Gram determinants of the two constructions coincide, and hence the corresponding lattices share the same density. Using the notion of density, we define the normalized minimum determinant and give an implicit lower bound depending on the center of the cyclic division algebra in use. The calculation of the normalized minimum determinant is then performed in practice by using explicit code constructions.

We describe the second (generalized) Feng-Rao distance for elements in an Arf numerical semigroup that are greater than or equal to the conductor of the semigroup. This provides a lower bound for the second Hamming weight for one point AG codes. In particular, we can obtain the second Feng-Rao distance for the codes defined by asymptotically good towers of function fields whose Weierstrass semigroups are inductive. In addition, we compute the second Feng-Rao number, and provide some examples and comparisons with previous results on this topic. These calculations rely on Ap\'{e}ry sets, and thus several results concerning Ap\'ery sets of Arf semigroups are presented.