Symmetric Rank Codes

  • Authors:
  • E. M. Gabidulin;N. I. Pilipchuk

  • Affiliations:
  • Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University) gab@pop3.mipt.ru;Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University) nina.pilipchuk@pop3.mipt.ru

  • Venue:
  • Problems of Information Transmission
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

As is well known, a finite field \mathbb{K}n = GF(qn) can be described in terms of n × n matrices A over the field \mathbb{K} = GF(q) such that their powers Ai, i = 1, 2, …, qn − 1, correspond to all nonzero elements of the field. It is proved that, for fields \mathbb{K}n of characteristic 2, such a matrix A can be chosen to be symmetric. Several constructions of field-representing symmetric matrices are given. These matrices Ai together with the all-zero matrix can be considered as a \mathbb{K}n-linear matrix code in the rank metric with maximum rank distance d = n and maximum possible cardinality qn. These codes are called symmetric rank codes. In the vector representation, such codes are maximum rank distance (MRD) linear [n, 1, n] codes, which allows one to use known rank-error-correcting algorithms. For symmetric codes, an algorithm of erasure symmetrization is proposed, which considerably reduces the decoding complexity as compared with standard algorithms. It is also shown that a linear [n, k, d = n − k + 1] MRD code \mathcal{V}k containing the above-mentioned one-dimensional symmetric code as a subcode has the following property: the corresponding transposed code is also \mathbb{K}n-linear. Such codes have an extended capability of correcting symmetric errors and erasures.