Partially symmetric monomial codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces partially symmetric monomial codes, a new family of codes that balance symmetry and decoding efficiency, bridging the gap between Reed-Muller and polar codes.

Contribution

The paper defines and constructs partially symmetric monomial codes, analyzing their structural properties and symmetry-related decoding advantages.

Findings

Partially symmetric monomial codes have fewer symmetries than Reed-Muller codes.

These codes often exhibit recursive structures.

A lower bound on their parameters is established with explicit constructions.

Abstract

A framework of monomial codes is considered, which includes linear codes generated by the evaluation of certain monomials. Polar and Reed-Muller codes are the two best-known representatives of such codes and can be considered as two extreme cases. Reed-Muller codes have a large automorphism group but their low-complexity maximum likelihood decoding still remains an open problem. On the other hand, polar codes have much less symmetries but admit the efficient near-ML decoding. We study the dependency between the code symmetries and the decoding efficiency. We introduce a new family of codes, partially symmetric monomial codes. These codes have a smaller group of symmetries than the Reed-Muller codes and are in this sense "between" RM and polar codes. A lower bound on their parameters is introduced along with the explicit construction which achieves it. Structural properties of these codes are demonstrated and it is shown that they often have a recursive structure.