Relative generalized hamming weights and extended weight polynomials of almost affine codes

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Castle Meeting on Coding Theory and Applications ICMCTA 2017: Coding Theory and Applications, 207-216. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66278-7_17 .This paper is devoted to giving a generalization from linear codes to the larger class of almost affine codes of two different results. One such result is how one can express the relative generalized Hamming weights of a pair of codes in terms of intersection properties between the smallest of these codes and subcodes of the largest code. The other result tells how one can find the extended weight polynomials, expressing the number of codewords of each possible weight, for each code in an infinite hierarchy of extensions of a code over a given alphabet. Our tools will be demi-matroids and matroids

Improved constructions of nested code pairs

Producción CientíficaTwo new constructions of linear nested code pairs are given for which the codimension and the relative minimum distances of the codes and their duals are good. By this we mean that for any two out of the three parameters the third parameter of the constructed code pair is large. Such pairs of nested codes are indispensable for the determination of good linear ramp secret sharing schemes. They can also be used to ensure reliable communication over asymmetric quantum channels. The new constructions result from carefully applying the Feng-Rao bounds to a family of codes defined from multivariate polynomials and Cartesian product point sets.The Danish Council for Independent Research (Grant N. DFF–4002-00367)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Projects MTM2015-65764-C3-2-P and MTM2015-69138-REDT)University Jaume I (Grant N. P1-1B2015-02

A Polymatroid Approach to Generalized Weights of Rank Metric Codes

We consider the notion of a $(q,m)$-polymatroid, due to Shiromoto, and the more general notion of $(q,m)$-demi-polymatroid, and show how generalized weights can be defined for them. Further, we establish a duality for these weights analogous to Wei duality for generalized Hamming weights of linear codes. The corresponding results of Ravagnani for Delsarte rank metric codes, and Martinez-Penas and Matsumoto for relative generalized rank weights are derived as a consequence.Comment: 22 pages; with minor revisions in the previous versio

Reed-Muller codes for random erasures and errors

This paper studies the parameters for which Reed-Muller (RM) codes over $GF(2)$ can correct random erasures and random errors with high probability, and in particular when can they achieve capacity for these two classical channels. Necessarily, the paper also studies properties of evaluations of multi-variate $GF(2)$ polynomials on random sets of inputs. For erasures, we prove that RM codes achieve capacity both for very high rate and very low rate regimes. For errors, we prove that RM codes achieve capacity for very low rate regimes, and for very high rates, we show that they can uniquely decode at about square root of the number of errors at capacity. The proofs of these four results are based on different techniques, which we find interesting in their own right. In particular, we study the following questions about $E(m,r)$, the matrix whose rows are truth tables of all monomials of degree $\leq r$ in $m$ variables. What is the most (resp. least) number of random columns in $E(m,r)$ that define a submatrix having full column rank (resp. full row rank) with high probability? We obtain tight bounds for very small (resp. very large) degrees $r$, which we use to show that RM codes achieve capacity for erasures in these regimes. Our decoding from random errors follows from the following novel reduction. For every linear code $C$ of sufficiently high rate we construct a new code $C'$, also of very high rate, such that for every subset $S$ of coordinates, if $C$ can recover from erasures in $S$, then $C'$ can recover from errors in $S$. Specializing this to RM codes and using our results for erasures imply our result on unique decoding of RM codes at high rate. Finally, two of our capacity achieving results require tight bounds on the weight distribution of RM codes. We obtain such bounds extending the recent \cite{KLP} bounds from constant degree to linear degree polynomials