On the Structure and Distances of Repeated-Root Constacyclic Codes of Prime Power Lengths Over Finite Commutative Chain Rings

Abstract

Let p be a prime, s be a positive integer, and R be a finite commutative chain ring with the characteristic as a power of p. For a unit λ ε R, λ-constacyclic codes of length ps over R are ideals of the quotient ring R[x]/(x(p) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</sup> -λ). In this paper, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which the quotient ring R[x]/(x(p) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</sup> - λ) is a chain ring. When R[x]/(x(p) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</sup> - λ) is a chain ring, all λ-constacyclic codes of length ps over R are known. In this paper, we establish the algebraic structures of all λ-constacyclic codes of length ps over R when R[x]/(x(p) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</sup> - λ) is a non-chain ring. We also determine the number of codewords in each of these codes. Using their algebraic structures, we obtain symbol-pair distances, Rosenbloom-Tsfasman (RT) distances, and RT weight distributions of all constacyclic codes of length ps over R. Apart from this, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a constacyclic code of length ps over R is maximumdistance separable with respect to the: 1) Hamming metric; 2) symbol-pair metric; and 3) RT metric. We also provide an algorithm to decode the constacyclic codes of length ps over R using the known decoding algorithms of linear codes over finite fields with respect to the Hamming, symbol-pair, and RT metrics.