Optimal Locally Repairable Codes of Distance 3 and 4 via Cyclic Codes

Like classical block codes, a locally repairable code also obeys the Singleton-type bound (we call a locally repairable code optimal if it achieves the Singleton-type bound). In the breakthrough work of Tamo and Barg, several classes of optimal locally repairable codes were constructed via subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes. Thus, the lengths of the codes given by Tamo and Barg are upper bounded by the code alphabet size q. Recently, it was proved through the extension of construction by Tamo and Barg that the length of q-ary optimal locally repairable codes can be q +1 by Jin et al. Surprisingly, Barg et al. presented a few examples of q-ary optimal locally repairable codes of small distance and locality with code length achieving roughly q
²
. Very recently, it was further shown in the work of Li et al. that there exist q-ary optimal locally repairable codes with the length bigger than q+1 and the distance proportional to n. Thus, it becomes an interesting and challenging problem to construct new families of q-ary optimal locally repairable codes of length bigger than q+1. In this paper, we construct a class of optimal locally repairable codes of distances 3 and 4 with unbounded length (i.e., length of the codes is independent of the code alphabet size). Our technique is through cyclic codes with particular generator and parity-check polynomials that are carefully chosen.