A bound on the minimum distance of generalized quasi-twisted codes

Abstract

Generalized quasi-twisted (GQT) codes form a generalization of quasi-twisted (QT) codes and generalized quasi-cyclic (GQC) codes. By the Chinese remainder theorem, the GQT codes can be decomposed into a direct sum of some linear codes over Galois extension fields, which leads to the trace representation of the GQT codes. Using this trace representation, we first prove the minimum distance bound for GQT codes with two constituents. Then we generalize the result to GQT codes with s constituents. Finally, we present some examples to show that the bound is better than the well-known Esmaeili-Yari bound and sharp in many instances.