Weil-Serre Type Bounds for Cyclic Codes

We give a new method in order to obtain Weil-Serre type bounds on the minimum distance of arbitrary cyclic codes over ${BBF}_{p^e}$ of length coprime to $p$, where $e ge 1$ is an arbitrary integer. In an earlier paper we obtained Weil-Serre type bounds for such codes only when $e=1$ or $e=2$ using lengthy explicit factorizations, which seems hopeless to generalize. The new method avoids such explicit factorizations and it produces an effective alternative. Using our method we obtain Weil–Serre type bounds in various cases. By examples we show that our bounds perform very well against Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) bound and they yield the exact minimum distance in some cases.