On the Covering Radius of Ternary Extremal Self-Dual Codes

In this paper, we investigate the covering radius of ternary extremal self-dual codes. The covering radii of all ternary extremal self-dual codes of lengths up to 20 were previously known. The complete coset weight distributions of the two inequivalent extremal self-dual codes of length 24 are determined. As a consequence, it is shown that every extremal ternary self-dual code of length up to 24 has covering radius which meets the Delsarte bound. The first example of a ternary extremal self-dual code with covering radius which does not meet the Delsarte bound is also found. It is worth mentioning that the found code is of length 32.