On the Geometry of Balls in the Grassmannian and List Decoding of Lifted Gabidulin Codes

The finite Grassmannian $\mathcal{G}_{q}(k,n)$ is defined as the set of all $k$-dimensional subspaces of the ambient space $\mathbb{F}_{q}^{n}$. Subsets of the finite Grassmannian are called constant dimension codes and have recently found an application in random network coding. In this setting codewords from $\mathcal{G}_{q}(k,n)$ are sent through a network channel and, since errors may occur during transmission, the received words can possible lie in $\mathcal{G}_{q}(k',n)$, where $k'\neq k$. In this paper, we study the balls in $\mathcal{G}_{q}(k,n)$ with center that is not necessarily in $\mathcal{G}_{q}(k,n)$. We describe the balls with respect to two different metrics, namely the subspace and the injection metric. Moreover, we use two different techniques for describing these balls, one is the Pl\"ucker embedding of $\mathcal{G}_{q}(k,n)$, and the second one is a rational parametrization of the matrix representation of the codewords. With these results, we consider the problem of list decoding a certain family of constant dimension codes, called lifted Gabidulin codes. We describe a way of representing these codes by linear equations in either the matrix representation or a subset of the Pl\"ucker coordinates. The union of these equations and the equations which arise from the description of the ball of a given radius in the Grassmannian describe the list of codewords with distance less than or equal to the given radius from the received word.Comment: To be published in Designs, Codes and Cryptography (Springer

Bounds on List Decoding of Rank-Metric Codes

So far, there is no polynomial-time list decoding algorithm (beyond half the minimum distance) for Gabidulin codes. These codes can be seen as the rank-metric equivalent of Reed--Solomon codes. In this paper, we provide bounds on the list size of rank-metric codes in order to understand whether polynomial-time list decoding is possible or whether it works only with exponential time complexity. Three bounds on the list size are proven. The first one is a lower exponential bound for Gabidulin codes and shows that for these codes no polynomial-time list decoding beyond the Johnson radius exists. Second, an exponential upper bound is derived, which holds for any rank-metric code of length $n$ and minimum rank distance $d$. The third bound proves that there exists a rank-metric code over \Fqm of length $n \leq m$ such that the list size is exponential in the length for any radius greater than half the minimum rank distance. This implies that there cannot exist a polynomial upper bound depending only on $n$ and $d$ similar to the Johnson bound in Hamming metric. All three rank-metric bounds reveal significant differences to bounds for codes in Hamming metric.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, short version presented at ISIT 201

Lowering the Error Floor of LDPC Codes Using Cyclic Liftings

Cyclic liftings are proposed to lower the error floor of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The liftings are designed to eliminate dominant trapping sets of the base code by removing the short cycles which form the trapping sets. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the cyclic permutations assigned to the edges of a cycle $c$ of length $\ell(c)$ in the base graph such that the inverse image of $c$ in the lifted graph consists of only cycles of length strictly larger than $\ell(c)$. The proposed method is universal in the sense that it can be applied to any LDPC code over any channel and for any iterative decoding algorithm. It also preserves important properties of the base code such as degree distributions, encoder and decoder structure, and in some cases, the code rate. The proposed method is applied to both structured and random codes over the binary symmetric channel (BSC). The error floor improves consistently by increasing the lifting degree, and the results show significant improvements in the error floor compared to the base code, a random code of the same degree distribution and block length, and a random lifting of the same degree. Similar improvements are also observed when the codes designed for the BSC are applied to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel

Problems on q-Analogs in Coding Theory

The interest in $q$-analogs of codes and designs has been increased in the last few years as a consequence of their new application in error-correction for random network coding. There are many interesting theoretical, algebraic, and combinatorial coding problems concerning these q-analogs which remained unsolved. The first goal of this paper is to make a short summary of the large amount of research which was done in the area mainly in the last few years and to provide most of the relevant references. The second goal of this paper is to present one hundred open questions and problems for future research, whose solution will advance the knowledge in this area. The third goal of this paper is to present and start some directions in solving some of these problems.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0805.3528 by other author

Iterative List-Decoding of Gabidulin Codes via Gr\"obner Based Interpolation

We show how Gabidulin codes can be list decoded by using an iterative parametrization approach. For a given received word, our decoding algorithm processes its entries one by one, constructing four polynomials at each step. This then yields a parametrization of interpolating solutions for the data so far. From the final result a list of all codewords that are closest to the received word with respect to the rank metric is obtained.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Information Theory Workshop 2014 in Hobart, Australi