HOPs and COPs: Room frames with partitionable transversals

In this paper, we construct Room frames with partitionable transversals. Direct and recursive constructions are used to find sets of disjoint complete ordered partitionable (COP) transversals and sets of disjoint holey ordered partitionable (HOP) transversals for Room frames. Our main results include upper and lower bounds on the number of disjoint COP transversals and the number of disjoint HOP transversals for Room frames of type 2n. This work is motivated by the large number of applications of these designs

Maximal partial Latin cubes

We prove that each maximal partial Latin cube must have more than 29.289% of its cells filled and show by construction that this is a nearly tight bound. We also prove upper and lower bounds on the number of cells containing a fixed symbol in maximal partial Latin cubes and hypercubes, and we use these bounds to determine for small orders n the numbers k for which there exists a maximal partial Latin cube of order n with exactly k entries. Finally, we prove that maximal partial Latin cubes of order n exist of each size from approximately half-full (n3/2 for even n ≥ 10 and (n3 + n)/2 for odd n ≥21) to completely full, except for when either precisely 1 or 2 cells are empty

Constructions of q-Ary Constant-Weight Codes

This paper introduces a new combinatorial construction for q-ary constant-weight codes which yields several families of optimal codes and asymptotically optimal codes. The construction reveals intimate connection between q-ary constant-weight codes and sets of pairwise disjoint combinatorial designs of various types.Comment: 12 page

Low-Density Parity-Check Codes From Transversal Designs With Improved Stopping Set Distributions

This paper examines the construction of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes from transversal designs based on sets of mutually orthogonal Latin squares (MOLS). By transferring the concept of configurations in combinatorial designs to the level of Latin squares, we thoroughly investigate the occurrence and avoidance of stopping sets for the arising codes. Stopping sets are known to determine the decoding performance over the binary erasure channel and should be avoided for small sizes. Based on large sets of simple-structured MOLS, we derive powerful constraints for the choice of suitable subsets, leading to improved stopping set distributions for the corresponding codes. We focus on LDPC codes with column weight 4, but the results are also applicable for the construction of codes with higher column weights. Finally, we show that a subclass of the presented codes has quasi-cyclic structure which allows low-complexity encoding.Comment: 11 pages; to appear in "IEEE Transactions on Communications

Constructing and embedding mutually orthogonal Latin squares: reviewing both new and existing results

We review results for the embedding of orthogonal partial Latin squares in orthogonal Latin squares, comparing and contrasting these with results for embedding partial Latin squares in Latin squares. We also present a new construction that uses the existence of a set of $t$ mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order $n$ to construct a set of $2t$ mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order $n^t$