Decoding Cyclic Codes up to a New Bound on the Minimum Distance

A new lower bound on the minimum distance of
q
-ary cyclic codes is proposed. This bound improves upon the Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem bound and, for some codes, upon the Hartmann-Tzeng bound. Several Boston bounds are special cases of our bound. For some classes of codes, the bound on the minimum distance is refined. Furthermore, a quadratic-time decoding algorithm up to this new bound is developed. The determination of the error locations is based on the Euclidean algorithm and a modified Chien search. The error evaluation is done by solving a generalization of Forney's formula.