$b$-symbol distance distribution of repeated-root cyclic codes

Abstract: Symbol-pair codes, introduced by Cassuto and Blaum [1], have been raised for symbol-pair read channels. This new idea is motivated by the limitation of the reading process in high-density data storage technologies. Yaakobi et al. [8] introduced codes for $b$-symbol read channels, where the read operation is performed as a consecutive sequence of $b>2$ symbols. In this paper, we come up with a method to compute the $b$-symbol-pair distance of two $n$-tuples, where $n$ is a positive integer. Also, we deal with the $b$-symbol-pair distances of some kind of cyclic codes of length $p^e$ over $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$.