New Lower Bounds for the Minimum Distance of Cyclic Codes and Applications to Locally Repairable Codes

Cyclic codes are an important class of linear codes. Bounding the minimum distance of cyclic codes is a long-standing research topic in coding theory, and several well-known and basic results have been developed on this topic. Recently, locally repairable codes (LRCs) have attracted much attention due to their repair efficiency in large-scale distributed storage systems. In this paper, by employing the singleton procedure technique, we first provide a sufficient condition for bounding the minimum distance of cyclic codes with typical defining sets. Secondly, by considering a specific case, we establish a connection between bounds for the minimum distance of cyclic codes and solutions to a system of inequalities. This connection leads to the derivation of new bounds, including some with general patterns. In particular, we provide three new bounds with general patterns, one of which serves as a generalization of the Betti-Sala bound. Finally, we present a generalized lower bound for a special case and construct several families of $(2, \delta)$-LRCs with unbounded length and minimum distance $2\delta$. It turns out that these LRCs are distance-optimal, and their parameters are new. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first construction of distance-optimal $(r, \delta)$-LRCs with unbounded length and minimum distance exceeding $r+\delta-1$.