On the constructions of MDS self-dual codes via cyclotomy

Abstract

MDS self-dual codes over finite fields have attracted a lot of attention in recent years by their theoretical interests in coding theory and applications in cryptography and combinatorics. In this paper we present a series of MDS self-dual codes with new length by using generalized Reed-Solomon codes and extended generalized Reed-Solomon codes as the candidates of MDS codes and taking their evaluation sets as a union of cyclotomic classes. The conditions on such MDS codes being self-dual are expressed in terms of cyclotomic numbers.