Some bounds on the cardinality of the $b$-symbol weight spectrum of codes

Abstract: The size of the Hamming distance spectrum of a code has received great attention in recent research. The main objective of this paper is to extend these significant theories to the $b$-symbol distance spectrum. We examine this question for various types of codes, including unrestricted codes, additive codes, linear codes, and cyclic codes, successively. For the first three cases, we determine the maximum size of the $b$-symbol distance spectra of these codes smoothly. For the case of cyclic codes, we introduce three approaches to characterize the upper bound for the cardinality of the $b$-symbol weight spectrum of cyclic codes, namely the period distribution approach, the primitive idempotent approach, and the $b$-symbol weight formula approach. As two by-products of this paper, the maximum number of symplectic weights of linear codes is determined, and a basic inequality among the parameters $[n,k,d_H(\C)]_q$ of cyclic codes is provided.