On full-rank perfect codes over finite fields

Abstract

We propose a construction of full-rank q-ary 1-perfect codes. This is a generalization of the construction of full-rank binary 1-perfect codes by Etzion and Vardy (1994). The properties of the i-components of q-ary Hamming codes are investigated, and the construction of full-rank q-ary 1-perfect codes is based on these properties. The switching construction of 1-perfect codes is generalized to the q-ary case. We propose a generalization of the notion of an i-component of a 1-perfect code and introduce the concept of an (i, σ)-component of a q-ary 1-perfect code. We also present a generalization of the Lindström–Schönheim construction of q-ary 1-perfect codes and provide a lower bound for the number of pairwise distinct q-ary 1-perfect codes of length n.