The connections among Hamming metric, $b$-symbol metric, and $r$-th generalized Hamming metric

Abstract: The $r$-th generalized Hamming metric and the $b$-symbol metric are two different generalizations of Hamming metric. The former is used on the wire-tap channel of Type II, and the latter is motivated by the limitations of the reading process in high-density data storage systems and applied to a read channel that outputs overlapping symbols. In this paper, we study the connections among the three metrics (that is, Hamming metric, $b$-symbol metric, and $r$-th generalized Hamming metric) mentioned above and give a conjecture about the $b$-symbol Griesmer Bound for cyclic codes. %Furthermore, we explore the combinatorial function of the size of the $b$-symbol weight set of a code $C$.