Rank equivalent and rank degenerate skew cyclic codes

Two skew cyclic codes can be equivalent for the Hamming metric only if they have the same length, and only the zero code is degenerate. The situation is completely different for the rank metric, where lengths of codes correspond to the number of outgoing links from the source when applying the code on a network. We study rank equivalences between skew cyclic codes of different lengths and, with the aim of finding the skew cyclic code of smallest length that is rank equivalent to a given one, we define different types of length for a given skew cyclic code, relate them and compute them in most cases. We give different characterizations of rank degenerate skew cyclic codes using conventional polynomials and linearized polynomials. Some known results on the rank weight hierarchy of cyclic codes for some lengths are obtained as particular cases and extended to all lengths and to all skew cyclic codes. Finally, we prove that the smallest length of a linear code that is rank equivalent to a given skew cyclic code can be attained by a pseudo-skew cyclic code. Throughout the paper, we find new relations between linear skew cyclic codes and their Galois closures

Subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes

We introduce a class of nonlinear cyclic error-correcting codes, which we call subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon (SSRS) codes. An SSRS code is a subset of a parent Reed-Solomon (RS) code consisting of the RS codewords whose components all lie in a fixed ν-dimensional vector subspace S of GF (2m). SSRS codes are constructed using properties of the Galois field GF(2m). They are not linear over the field GF(2ν), which does not come into play, but rather are Abelian group codes over S. However, they are linear over GF(2), and the symbol-wise cyclic shift of any codeword is also a codeword. Our main result is an explicit but complicated formula for the dimension of an SSRS code. It implies a simple lower bound, which gives the true value of the dimension for most, though not all, subspaces. We also prove several important duality properties. We present some numerical examples, which show, among other things, that (1) SSRS codes can have a higher dimension than comparable subfield subcodes of RS codes, so that even if GF(2ν) is a subfield of GF(2m), it may not be the best ν-dimensional subspace for constructing SSRS codes; and (2) many high-rate SSRS codes have a larger dimension than any previously known code with the same values of n, d, and q, including algebraic-geometry codes. These examples suggest that high-rate SSRS codes are promising candidates to replace Reed-Solomon codes in high-performance transmission and storage systems