Improved efficiency for covering codes matching the sphere-covering bound

Abstract: A covering code is a subset $\mathcal{C} \subseteq {0,1}^n$ with the property that any $z \in {0,1}^n$ is close to some $c \in \mathcal{C}$ in Hamming distance. For every $\epsilon,\delta>0$, we show a construction of a family of codes with relative covering radius $\delta + \epsilon$ and rate $1 - \mathrm{H}(\delta) $ with block length at most $\exp(O((1/\epsilon) \log (1/\epsilon)))$ for every $\epsilon > 0$. This improves upon a folklore construction which only guaranteed codes of block length $\exp(1/\epsilon^2)$. The main idea behind this proof is to find a distribution on codes with relatively small support such that most of these codes have good covering properties.