Nonlinear Codes with Low Redundancy

Determining the largest size, or equivalently finding the lowest redundancy, of q-ary codes for given length and minimum distance is one of the central and fundamental problems in coding theory. Inspired by the construction of Varshamov-Tenengolts (VT for short) codes via check-sums, we provide an explicit construction of nonlinear codes with lower redundancy than linear codes under the same length and minimum distance. Similar to the VT codes, our construction works well for small distance (or even constant distance). Furthermore, we design quasi-linear time decoding algorithms for both erasure and adversary errors

A Lower Bound on the List-Decodability of Insdel Codes

For codes equipped with metrics such as Hamming metric, symbol pair metric or cover metric, the Johnson bound guarantees list-decodability of such codes. That is, the Johnson bound provides a lower bound on the list-decoding radius of a code in terms of its relative minimum distance $\delta$, list size $L$ and the alphabet size $q.$ For study of list-decodability of codes with insertion and deletion errors (we call such codes insdel codes), it is natural to ask the open problem whether there is also a Johnson-type bound. The problem was first investigated by Wachter-Zeh and the result was amended by Hayashi and Yasunaga where a lower bound on the list-decodability for insdel codes was derived. The main purpose of this paper is to move a step further towards solving the above open problem. In this work, we provide a new lower bound for the list-decodability of an insdel code. As a consequence, we show that unlike the Johnson bound for codes under other metrics that is tight, the bound on list-decodability of insdel codes given by Hayashi and Yasunaga is not tight. Our main idea is to show that if an insdel code with a given Levenshtein distance $d$ is not list-decodable with list size $L$, then the list decoding radius is lower bounded by a bound involving $L$ and $d$. In other words, if the list decoding radius is less than this lower bound, the code must be list-decodable with list size $L$. At the end of the paper we use such bound to provide an insdel-list-decodability bound for various well-known codes, which has not been extensively studied before

List Decoding of Rank-Metric Codes with Row-To-Column Ratio Bigger Than 1/2

Despite numerous results about the list decoding of Hamming-metric codes, development of list decoding on rank-metric codes is not as rapid as its counterpart. The bound of list decoding obeys the Gilbert-Varshamov bound in both the metrics. In the case of the Hamming-metric, the Gilbert-Varshamov bound is a trade-off among rate, decoding radius and alphabet size, while in the case of the rank-metric, the Gilbert-Varshamov bound is a trade-off among rate, decoding radius and column-to-row ratio (i.e., the ratio between the numbers of columns and rows). Hence, alphabet size and column-to-row ratio play a similar role for list decodability in each metric. In the case of the Hamming-metric, it is more challenging to list decode codes over smaller alphabets. In contrast, in the case of the rank-metric, it is more difficult to list decode codes with large column-to-row ratio. In particular, it is extremely difficult to list decode square matrix rank-metric codes (i.e., the column-to-row ratio is equal to 1). The main purpose of this paper is to explicitly construct a class of rank-metric codes ? of rate R with the column-to-row ratio up to 2/3 and efficiently list decode these codes with decoding radius beyond the decoding radius (1-R)/2 (note that (1-R)/2 is at least half of relative minimum distance ?). In literature, the largest column-to-row ratio of rank-metric codes that can be efficiently list decoded beyond half of minimum distance is 1/2. Thus, it is greatly desired to efficiently design list decoding algorithms for rank-metric codes with the column-to-row ratio bigger than 1/2 or even close to 1. Our key idea is to compress an element of the field F_q? into a smaller F_q-subspace via a linearized polynomial. Thus, the column-to-row ratio gets increased at the price of reducing the code rate. Our result shows that the compression technique is powerful and it has not been employed in the topic of list decoding of both the Hamming and rank metrics. Apart from the above algebraic technique, we follow some standard techniques to prune down the list. The algebraic idea enables us to pin down the message into a structured subspace of dimension linear in the number n of columns. This "periodic" structure allows us to pre-encode the message to prune down the list

Explicit Construction of q-ary 2-deletion Correcting Codes with Low Redundancy

We consider the problem of efficient construction of q-ary 2-deletion correcting codes with low redundancy. We show that our construction requires less redundancy than any existing efficiently encodable q-ary 2-deletion correcting codes. Precisely speaking, we present an explicit construction of a q-ary 2-deletion correcting code with redundancy 5 log(n)+10log(log(n)) + 3 log(q)+O(1). Using a minor modification to the original construction, we obtain an efficiently encodable q-ary 2-deletion code that is efficiently list-decodable. Similarly, we show that our construction of list-decodable code requires a smaller redundancy compared to any existing list-decodable codes. To obtain our sketches, we transform a q-ary codeword to a binary string which can then be used as an input to the underlying base binary sketch. This is then complemented with additional q-ary sketches that the original q-ary codeword is required to satisfy. In other words, we build our codes via a binary 2-deletion code as a black-box. Finally we utilize the binary 2-deletion code proposed by Guruswami and Hastad to our construction to obtain the main result of this paper

Upper bounds on maximum lengths of Singleton-optimal locally repairable codes

A locally repairable code is called Singleton-optimal if it achieves the Singleton-type bound. Such codes are of great theoretic interest in the study of locally repairable codes. In the recent years there has been a great amount of work on this topic. One of the main problems in this topic is to determine the largest length of a q-ary Singleton-optimal locally repairable code for given locality and minimum distance. Unlike classical MDS codes, the maximum length of Singleton? Optimal locally repairable codes are very sensitive to minimum distance and locality. Thus, it is more challenging and complicated to investigate the maximum length of Singleton-optimal locally repairable codes. In literature, there has been already some research on this problem. However, most of work is concerned with some specific parameter regime such as small minimum distance and locality, and rely on the constraint that (r + 1)|n and recovery sets are disjoint, where r is locality and n is the code length. In this paper we study the problem for large range of parameters including the case where minimum distance is proportional to length. In addition, we also derive some upper bounds on the maximum length of Singleton-optimal locally repairable codes with small minimum distance by removing this constraint. It turns out that even without the constraint we still get better upper bounds for codes with small locality and distance compared with known results. Furthermore, based on our upper bounds for codes with small distance and locality and some propagation rule that we propose in this paper, we are able to derive some upper bounds for codes with relatively large distance and locality assuming that (r + 1)|n and recovery sets are disjoint

Asymptotic construction of locally repairable codes with multiple recovering sets

Locally repairable codes have been extensively investigated due to practical applications in distributed and cloud storage systems in recent years. However, not much work on asymptotic behavior of locally repairable codes has been done. In particular, there is few result on constructive lower bound of asymptotic behavior of locally repairable codes with multiple recovering sets. In this paper, we construct some families of asymptotically good locally repairable codes with multiple recovering sets via automorphism groups of function fields of the Garcia-Stichtenoth towers. The main advantage of our construction is to allow more flexibility of localities