Maximum distance separable symbol-pair codes

Abstract

We study (symbol-pair) codes for symbol-pair read channels introduced recently by Cassuto and Blaum (2010). A Singleton-type bound on symbol-pair codes is established and infinite families of optimal symbol-pair codes are constructed. These codes are maximum distance separable (MDS) in the sense that they meet the Singleton-type bound. In contrast to classical codes, where all known q-ary MDS codes have length O(q), we show that q-ary MDS symbol-pair codes can have length Ω(q <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ). We also construct equidistant cyclic MDS symbol-pair codes from Mendelsohn designs.