On the Ding and Helleseth's 7th open problem about optimal ternary cyclic codes

Abstract

Cyclic codes are a subclass of linear codes and have applications in consumer electronics, data storage systems and communication systems as they have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. In 2013, Ding, et al. presented nine open problems about optimal ternary cyclic codes. The first two and the 6th problems were completely solved, and the third and last three problems were partially solved. In this paper, we focus on the 7th problem. By determining the root set of some special polynomials over finite fields, we give an incomplete answer and then present a counterexample. Furthermore, we construct two new classes of optimal ternary cyclic codes with respect to the Sphere Packing Bound by studying some special polynomials over finite fields.