On deep holes of generalized projective Reed-Solomon codes

Abstract: Determining deep holes is an important topic in decoding Reed-Solomon codes. Let $l\ge 1$ be an integer and $a_1,\ldots,a_l$ be arbitrarily given $l$ distinct elements of the finite field ${\bf F}q$ of $q$ elements with the odd prime number $p$ as its characteristic. Let $D={\bf F}_q\backslash{a_1,\ldots,a_l}$ and $k$ be an integer such that $2\le k\le q-l-1$. In this paper, we study the deep holes of generalized projective Reed-Solomon code ${\rm GPRS}_q(D, k)$ of length $q-l+1$ and dimension $k$ over ${\bf F}_q$. For any $f(x)\in {\bf F}_q[x]$, we let $f(D)=(f(y_1),\ldots,f(y{q-l}))$ if $D={y_1, ..., y_{q-l}}$ and $c_{k-1}(f(x))$ be the coefficient of $x^{k-1}$ of $f(x)$. By using D\"ur's theorem on the relation between the covering radius and minimum distance of ${\rm GPRS}q(D, k)$, we show that if $u(x)\in {\bf F}_q[x]$ with $\deg (u(x))=k$, then the received codeword $(u(D), c{k-1}(u(x)))$ is a deep hole of ${\rm GPRS}q(D, k)$ if and only if the sum $\sum\limits{y\in I}y$ is nonzero for any subset $I\subseteq D$ with $#(I)=k$. We show also that if $j$ is an integer with $1\leq j\leq l$ and $u_j(x):= \lambda_j(x-a_j)^{q-2}+\nu_j x^{k-1}+f_{\leq k-2}^{(j)}(x)$ with $\lambda_j\in {\bf F}q^*$, $\nu_j\in {\bf F}_q$ and $f{\leq{k-2}}^{(j)}(x)\in{\bf F}q[x]$ being a polynomial of degree at most $k-2$, then $(u_j(D), c{k-1}(u_j(x)))$ is a deep hole of ${\rm GPRS}q(D, k)$ if and only if the sum $\binom{q-2}{k-1}(-a_j)^{q-1-k}\prod\limits{y\in I}(a_j-y)+e$ is nonzero for any subset $I\subseteq D$ with $#(I)=k$, where $e$ is the identity of the group ${\bf F}q^*$. This implies that $(u_j(D), c{k-1}(u_j(x)))$ is a deep hole of ${\rm GPRS}_q(D, k)$ if $p|k$.