A Construction of New MDS Symbol-Pair Codes

Recently, symbol-pair codes are proposed to protect against pair errors in symbol-pair read channels. One main task in symbol-pair coding theory is to design codes with large minimum pair distance. Maximum distance separable (MDS) symbol-pair codes are optimal in the sense they attain maximal minimum pair distance. In this paper, based on constacyclic codes, we construct some new MDS symbol-pair codes with minimum pair-distance five and six. Compared with classical q-ary MDS codes, the constructed MDS symbol-pair codes have length up to q
²
+q+1.