Distance Distribution to Received Words in Reed-Solomon Codes

Let $\mathbb{F}q$ be the finite field of $q$ elements. In this paper we obtain bounds on the following counting problem: given a polynomial $f(x)\in \mathbb{F}q[x]$ of degree $k+m$ and a non-negative integer $r$, count the number of polynomials $g(x)\in \mathbb{F}q[x]$ of degree at most $k-1$ such that $f(x)+g(x)$ has exactly $r$ roots in $\mathbb{F}q$. Previously, explicit formulas were known only for the cases $m=0, 1, 2$. As an application, we obtain an asymptotic formula on the list size of the standard Reed-Solomon code $[q, k, q-k+1]_q$.