On the Nonperiodic Cyclic Equivalence Classes of Reed-Solomon Codes

Picking up exactly one member from each of the nonperiodic cyclic equivalence classes of an (n, k + 1) Reed-Solomon code E over GF(q) gives a code, E”, which has bounded Hamming correlation values and the self-synchronizing property. The exact size of E” is shown to be 1/n∑_dn μ(d)q^1+[k/d], where µ(d) is the Möbius function, [x] is the integer part of x, and the summation is over all the divisors d of n = q ~ 1. A construction for a subset V of E is given to prove that |E“| ≥ |V| = (q^k+1-q^k+1-N)/(q — 1) where N is the number of integers from 1 to k which are relatively prime to q —1. A necessary and sufficient condition for |E“| = |V| is proved and some special cases are presented with examples. Furthermore, for all possible values of q2, a number B(q) is determined such that |E“| = |V| for 1 ≤k ≤ B(q) and “||V| for kB(q).