On Quasi-Cyclic Codes as a Generalization of Cyclic Codes

Abstract: In this article we see quasi-cyclic codes as block cyclic codes. We generalize some properties of cyclic codes to quasi-cyclic ones such as generator polynomials and ideals. Indeed we show a one-to-one correspondence between l-quasi-cyclic codes of length m and ideals of M_l(Fq)[X]/(X^m-1). This permits to construct new classes of codes, namely quasi-BCH and quasi-evaluation codes. We study the parameters of such codes and propose a decoding algorithm up to half the designed minimum distance. We even found one new quasi-cyclic code with better parameters than known [189, 11, 125]_F4 and 48 derivated codes beating the known bounds as well.