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Wikipedia / Justesen code

In coding theory, Justesen codes form a class of error-correcting codes that have a constant rate, constant relative distance, and a constant alphabet size.

Before the Justesen error correction code was discovered, no error correction code was known that had all of these three parameters as a constant.

Subsequently, other ECC codes with this property have been discovered, for example expander codes. These codes have important applications in computer science such as in the construction of small-bias sample spaces.

Justesen codes are derived as the code concatenation of a Reed–Solomon code and the Wozencraft ensemble.

The Reed–Solomon codes used achieve constant rate and constant relative distance at the expense of an alphabet size that is linear in the message length.

The Wozencraft ensemble is a family of codes that achieve constant rate and constant alphabet size, but the relative distance is only constant for most of the codes in the family.

The concatenation of the two codes first encodes the message using the Reed–Solomon code, and then encodes each symbol of the codeword further using a code from the Wozencraft ensemble – using a different code of the ensemble at each position of the codeword.

This is different from usual code concatenation where the inner codes are the same for each position. The Justesen code can be constructed very efficiently using only logarithmic space.

Definition

.

.

.

elements.

is chosen to be Reed Solomon code over a field of rate.

. The set of inner codes is the Wozencraft ensemble.

Property of Justesen code

.

Theorem

Proof

we prove that the Hamming distance. For any given

Suppose

is a Wozencraft ensemble then

then

. Define:

.

Due to the Wozencraft Ensemble Theorem so

Finally, we have

which completes the proof.

Comments

We want to consider the "strongly explicit code". So the question is what the "strongly explicit code" is. Loosely speaking, for linear code, the "explicit" property is related to the complexity of constructing its generator matrix G.

That in effect means that we can compute the matrix in logarithmic space without using the brute force algorithm to verify that a code has a given satisfied distance.

For the other codes that are not linear, we can consider the complexity of the encoding algorithm.

So by far, we can see that the Wonzencraft ensemble and Reed-Solomon codes are strongly explicit. Therefore, we have the following result:

Corollary: > 0 for small q) and has a strongly explicit construction.

An example of a Justesen code

The following slightly different code is referred to as the Justesen code in MacWilliams/MacWilliams. It is the particular case of the above-considered Justesen code for a very particular Wonzencraft ensemble:

Let R be a Reed-Solomon code of length N = 2m1, rank K and minimum weight NK+1.

The symbols of R are elements of F = GF(2m) and the codewords are obtained by taking every polynomial over F of degree less than K and listing the values of on the non-zero elements of F in some predetermined order.

Let α be a primitive element of F. For a codeword a = (a1,...,aN) from R, let b be the vector of length 2N over F given by

and let c be the vector of length 2N m obtained from b by expressing each element of F as a binary vector of length m. The Justesen code is the linear code containing all such c.

The parameters of this code are length 2m N, dimension m K and minimum distance at least

is the greatest integer. (See MacWilliams/MacWilliams for a proof.)

See also

References