Some new binary codes with improved minimum distances

It has been well-known that the class of quasi-cyclic (QC) codes contain many good codes. In thispaper, a method to conduct a computer search for binary 2-generator QC codes is presented, anda large number of good 2-generator QC codes have been obtained. 5 new binary QC codes thatimprove the lower bounds on minimum distance are presented. Furthermore, with new 2-generatorQC codes and Construction X, 2 new improved binary linear codes are obtained. With the standardconstruction techniques, another 16 new binary linear codes that improve the lower bound on theminimum distance have also been obtained.

An [$$n, k, d$$n,k,d] code is a binary linear code of block length $$n$$n, dimension $$k$$k and minimum Hamming distance $$d$$d. Since the minimum distance determines the error detection or correction capability, it is desired that $$d$$d is as large as possible for the given block length $$n$$n and dimension $$k$$k. One of the most fundamental problems in coding theory is to construct codes with best possible minimum distances. This problem is very difficult in both theory and practice. During the last decades, it has proved that the class of quasi-cyclic (QC) codes contain many such codes. In this paper, augmentation of binary QC codes is studied. A new augmentation algorithm is presented, and 10 new $$h$$h-generator QC codes that are better than previously known code have been constructed. Furthermore, Construction X has been applied to obtain another 18 new improved binary linear codes. With the standard construction techniques, a total of 124 new binary linear codes that improve the lower bound on the minimum distance have been obtained.

This paper studies linear and affine error-correcting codes for correcting synchronization errors such as insertions and deletions. We call such codes linear/affine insdel codes. Linear codes that can correct even a single deletion are limited to having an information rate at most (achieved by the trivial two fold repetition code). Previously, it was (erroneously) reported that more generally no nontrivial linear codes correcting deletions exist, i.e., that the -fold repetition codes and its rate of are basically optimal for any . We disprove this and show the existence of binary linear codes of length and rate just below capable of correcting insertions and deletions. This identifies rate as a sharp threshold for recovery from deletions for linear codes and reopens the quest for a better understanding of the capabilities of linear codes for correcting insertions/deletions. We prove novel outer bounds and existential inner bounds for the rate vs. (edit) distance trade-off of linear insdel codes. We complement our existential results with an efficient synchronization-string-based transformation that converts any asymptotically good linear code for Hamming errors into an asymptotically good linear code for insdel errors. Last, we show that the -rate limitation does not hold for affine codes by giving an explicit affine code of rate which can efficiently correct a constant fraction of insdel errors.

By means of local search techniques, five quasi-cyclic codes have been found that have a higher minimum distance than known binary linear codes. The new codes have parameters [102,17,37], [60,20,17], [84,21,27], [105,21,36], and [100,25,30]. Also, 39 other quasi-cyclic codes have been found that improve the parameter sets of previously known quasi-cyclic codes. Twenty-four of them give a new and easier description of binary linear codes with best known parameters.

A coordinate of a binary code of size M is said to be balanced if the number of zero and ones in the coordinate is either \(\lfloor M/2\rfloor \) or \(\lceil M/2 \rceil \) (that is, exactly \(M/2\) for even M). Since good codes (of various types) tend to be balanced in all coordinates, various conjectures have been made regarding the existence of such codes. It is here shown that there are parameters for which there are no optimal binary error-correcting codes with a balanced coordinate. This is proved by the code attaining \(A(17,8) = 36\), which is shown to be unique here; \(A(n,d)\) denotes the maximum size of a binary code of length n and minimum distance d. It is further shown that \(A(18,8) \le 68\).

We study certain projections of binary linear codes onto larger fields. These projections include the well-known projection of the extended Golay [24,12,8] code onto the hexacode over $\mbox{GF}(4)$ and the projection of the Reed--Muller code R(2,5) onto the unique self-dual [8,4,4] code over $\mbox{GF}(4)$. We give a characterization of these projections, and we construct several binary linear codes which have best known optimal parameters, for instance, [20,11,5], [40,22,8], [48,21,12], and [72,31,16]. We also relate the automorphism group of a quaternary code to that of the corresponding binary code.

A binary code C ⊆ F2n with minimum distance at least d and codewords of Hamming weight w is called an (n,d,w) constant weight code. The maximum size of an (n,d,w) constant weight code is denoted by A(n,d,w), and codes of this size are said to be optimal. In a computer-aided approach, optimal (n,d,w) constant weight codes are here classified up to equivalence for d=4, n ≤ 12; d=6, n ≤ 14; d=8, n ≤ 17; d=10, n ≤ 20 (with one exception); d=12, n ≤ 23; d=14, n ≤ 26; d=16, n ≤ 28; and d=18, n ≤ 28. Moreover, several new upper bounds on A(n,d,w) are obtained, leading among other things to the exact values A(12,4,5)=80, A(15,6,7)=69, A(18,8,7)=33, A(19,8,7)=52, A(19,8,8)=78, and A(20,8,8)=130 . Since A(15,6,6)=70, this gives the first known example of parameters for which A(n,d,w-1) > A(n,d,w) with w ≤ n/2. A scheme based on double counting is developed for validating the classification results.

A new family of nonlinear codes, called weak flip codes, is presented and is shown to contain many beautiful properties. In particular, the subfamily of fair weak flip codes can be seen as a generalization of linear codes. Different from linear codes that only exist for a number of codewords M being an integer-power of 2, the fair weak flip code can be defined for an arbitrary M. It is then noted that the fair weak flip codes are related to binary nonlinear Hadamard codes: both code families maximize the minimum Hamming distance and meet the Plotkin bound. However, while the binary nonlinear Hadamard codes have only been shown to possess good Hamming-distance properties, the fair weak flip codes are proven to be globally optimal (in the sense of minimizing the error probability) among all linear or nonlinear codes for the binary erasure channel (BEC) for many values of the blocklength n and for M≤6. For M>6, similar optimality results are conjectured. The results in this paper are founded on a new powerful tool for the analysis and generation of block codes: the column-wise approach to the codebook matrix.

Deep holes are very important in the decoding of generalized RS codes, and deep holes of RS codes have been widely studied, but there are few works on constructing general linear codes based on deep holes. Therefore, we consider constructing binary linear codes by combining deep holes with binary BCH codes. In this article, we consider the 2-error-correcting binary primitive BCH codes and the extended codes to construct new binary linear codes by combining them with deep holes, respectively. Furthermore, three classes of binary linear codes are constructed, and then we determine the parameters and the weight distributions of these new binary linear codes.

We obtain a characterization on self-orthogonality for a given binary linear code in terms of the number of column vectors in its generator matrix, which extends the result of Bouyukliev et al. (2006). As an application, we give an algorithmic method to embed a given binary k-dimensional linear code <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> ( k = 3,4) into a self-orthogonal code of the shortest length which has the same dimension k and minimum distance d' ≥ d( <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> ). For k > 4, we suggest a recursive method to embed a k-dimensional linear code to a self-orthogonal code. We also give new explicit formulas for the minimum distances of optimal self-orthogonal codes for any length n with dimension 4 and any length n \not ≡ 6, 13,14,21,22,28,29 (mod 31) with dimension 5.

Constacyclic codes over <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" altimg="si1.gif" overflow="scroll"><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>F</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub><mml:mo>+</mml:mo><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi mathvariant="italic">uF</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math>

Locally decodable codes are error correcting codes with the extra property that, in order to retrieve the correct value of just one position of the input with high probability, it is sufficient to read a small number of positions of the corresponding, possibly corrupted codeword. A breakthrough result by Yekhanin showed that 3-query linear locally decodable codes may have subexponential length. The construction of Yekhanin, and the three query constructions that followed, achieve correctness only up to a certain limit which is $1 - 3 delta$ for nonbinary codes, where an adversary is allowed to corrupt up to delta fraction of the codeword. The largest correctness for a subexponential length 3-query binary code is achieved in a construction by Woodruff, and it is below 1 - 3 delta. We show that achieving slightly larger correctness (as a function of $delta$) requires exponential codeword length for 3-query codes. Previously, there were no larger than quadratic lower bounds known for locally decodable codes with more than 2 queries, even in the case of 3-query linear codes. Our results hold for linear codes over arbitrary finite fields and for binary nonlinear codes. Considering larger number of queries, we obtain lower bounds for q-query codes for q>3, under certain assumptions on the decoding algorithm that have been commonly used in previous constructions. We also prove bounds on the largest correctness achievable by these decoding algorithms, regardless of the length of the code. Our results explain the limitations on correctness in previous constructions using such decoding algorithms. In addition, our results imply tradeoffs on the parameters of error correcting data structures.

Constructing error-correcting binary codes using transitive permutation groups

Sixteen new binary quasi-cyclic linear codes improving the best known lower bounds on minimum distance in Brouwer's tables are constructed. The parameters of these codes are [102, 26, 32], [102, 27, 30], [142, 35, 40], [142, 36, 38] [146, 36, 40], [170, 16, 72], [170, 20, 66], [170, 33, 52] [170, 36, 50], [178, 33, 56], [178, 34, 54], [182, 27, 64] [182, 36, 56], [186, 17, 76], [210, 23, 80], [254, 22, 102] Sixty cyclic and thirty quasi-cyclic codes, which attain the respective bounds in Brouwer's table and are not included in Chen's table are presented as well.

A triply even code is a binary linear code in which the weight of every codeword is divisible by 8. We show how two doubly even codes of lengths m_1 and m_2 can be combined to make a triply even code of length m_1+m_2, and then prove that every maximal triply even code of length 48 can be obtained by combining two doubly even codes of length 24 in a certain way. Using this result, we show that there are exactly 10 maximal triply even codes of length 48 up to equivalence.