Design of tch-type sequences for communications

This thesis deals with the design of a class of cyclic codes inspired by TCH codewords. Since TCH codes are linked to finite fields the fundamental concepts and facts about abstract algebra, namely group theory and number theory, constitute the first part of the thesis. By exploring group geometric properties and identifying an equivalence between some operations on codes and the symmetries of the dihedral group we were able to simplify the generation of codewords thus saving on the necessary number of computations. Moreover, we also presented an algebraic method to obtain binary generalized TCH codewords of length N = 2k, k = 1,2, . . . , 16. By exploring Zech logarithm’s properties as well as a group theoretic isomorphism we developed a method that is both faster and less complex than what was proposed before. In addition, it is valid for all relevant cases relating the codeword length N and not only those resulting from N = p

Partitions of codes

In this thesis we look at coding theory wherein we introduce the concept of perspective, a generalisation on the minimum distance of a code, which naturally leads to a partition of the code. Subsequently we introduce focused splittings, which shall be shown to be a generalisation of perfect codes. We investigate the existence of such objects, and address questions such as the complexity of finding a focused splittings, which we show to be NPComplete. We analyse the symmetries of focused splittings. We use focused splittings to address the problem of error correction and we construct an encoding method based on them. Finally we test this construction for various classes of focused splittings