Asymptotic Properties of Quasi-Group Codes

This is a manuscript of a chapter prepared for a book. The good codes possess large information length and large minimum distance. A class of codes is said to be asymptotically good if there exists a positive real $\delta$ such that, for any positive integer $N$ we can find a code in the class with code length greater than $N$, and with both the rate and the relative minimum distance greater than $\delta$. The linear codes over any finite field are asymptotically good. More interestingly, the (asymptotic) GV-bound is a phase transition point for the linear codes; i.e., asymptotically speaking, the parameters of most linear codes attain the GV-bound. It is a long-standing open question: whether or not the cyclic codes over a finite field (which are an important class of codes) are asymptotically good? However, from a long time ago the quasi-cyclic codes of index $2$ were proved to be asymptotically good. This chapter consists of some of our studies on the asymptotic properties of several classes of quasi-group codes. We'll explain the studies in a consistent and self-contained style. We begin with the classical results on linear codes. In many cases we consider the quasi-group codes over finite abelian groups (including the cyclic case as a subcase of course), and study their asymptotic properties along two directions: (1) the order of the group (the coindex) is fixed while the index is going to infinity; (2) the index is small while the order of the group (the coindex) is going to infinity. Finally we describe the story on dihedral codes. The dihedral groups are non-abelian but near to cyclic groups (they have cyclic subgroups of index $2$). The asymptotic goodness of binary dihedral codes was obtained in the beginning of this century, and extended to the general dihedral codes recently.