Self-Repairing Codes for Distributed Storage - A Projective Geometric Construction

Self-Repairing Codes (SRC) are codes designed to suit the need of coding for distributed networked storage: they not only allow stored data to be recovered even in the presence of node failures, they also provide a repair mechanism where as little as two live nodes can be contacted to regenerate the data of a failed node. In this paper, we propose a new instance of self-repairing codes, based on constructions of spreads coming from projective geometry. We study some of their properties to demonstrate the suitability of these codes for distributed networked storage.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Quantum Synchronizable Codes From Finite Geometries

Quantum synchronizable error-correcting codes are special quantum error-correcting codes that are designed to correct both the effect of quantum noise on qubits and misalignment in block synchronization. It is known that, in principle, such a code can be constructed through a combination of a classical linear code and its subcode if the two are both cyclic and dual-containing. However, finding such classical codes that lead to promising quantum synchronizable error-correcting codes is not a trivial task. In fact, although there are two families of classical codes that are proved to produce quantum synchronizable codes with good minimum distances and highest possible tolerance against misalignment, their code lengths have been restricted to primes and Mersenne numbers. In this paper, examining the incidence vectors of projective spaces over the finite fields of characteristic 2, we give quantum synchronizable codes from cyclic codes whose lengths are not primes or Mersenne numbers. These projective geometric codes achieve good performance in quantum error correction and possess the best possible ability to recover synchronization, thereby enriching the variety of good quantum synchronizable codes. We also extend the current knowledge of cyclic codes in classical coding theory by explicitly giving generator polynomials of the finite geometric codes and completely characterizing the minimum weight nonzero codewords. In addition to the codes based on projective spaces, we carry out a similar analysis on the well-known cyclic codes from Euclidean spaces that are known to be majority logic decodable and determine their exact minimum distances

Small weight codewords of projective geometric codes II

The $p$-ary linear code $\mathcal C_{k}(n,q)$ is defined as the row space of the incidence matrix $A$ of $k$-spaces and points of $\text{PG}(n,q)$. It is known that if $q$ is square, a codeword of weight $q^k\sqrt{q}+\mathcal O \left( q^{k-1} \right)$ exists that cannot be written as a linear combination of at most $\sqrt{q}$ rows of $A$. Over the past few decades, researchers have put a lot of effort towards proving that any codeword of smaller weight does meet this property. We show that if $q \geqslant 32$ is a composite prime power, every codeword of $\mathcal C_k(n,q)$ up to weight $\mathcal O \left( {q^k\sqrt{q}} \right)$ is a linear combination of at most $\sqrt{q}$ rows of $A$. We also generalise this result to the codes $\mathcal C_{j,k}(n,q)$, which are defined as the $p$-ary row span of the incidence matrix of $k$-spaces and $j$-spaces, $j < k$.Comment: 22 page

Maximum Weight Spectrum Codes

In the recent work \cite{shi18}, a combinatorial problem concerning linear codes over a finite field \F_q was introduced. In that work the authors studied the weight set of an $[n,k]_q$ linear code, that is the set of non-zero distinct Hamming weights, showing that its cardinality is upper bounded by $\frac{q^k-1}{q-1}$. They showed that this bound was sharp in the case $q=2$, and in the case $k=2$. They conjectured that the bound is sharp for every prime power $q$ and every positive integer $k$. In this work quickly establish the truth of this conjecture. We provide two proofs, each employing different construction techniques. The first relies on the geometric view of linear codes as systems of projective points. The second approach is purely algebraic. We establish some lower bounds on the length of codes that satisfy the conjecture, and the length of the new codes constructed here are discussed.Comment: 19 page