On the Construction of Permutation Arrays via Mappings from Binary Vectors to Permutations

An (n, d, k)-mapping f is a mapping from binary vectors of length n to permutations of length n + k such that for all x, y {0,1}ⁿ, d_H (f(x), f(y)) ≥ d_H (x, y) + d, if d_H (x, y) ≤ (n + k) − d and d_H (f(x), f(y)) = n + k, if d_H (x, y) > (n + k) − d. In this paper, we construct an (n,3,2)-mapping for any positive integer n ≥ 6. An (n, r)-permutation array is a permutation array of length n and any two permutations of which have Hamming distance at least r. Let P(n, r) denote the maximum size of an (n, r)-permutation array and A(n, r) denote the same setting for binary codes. Applying (n,3,2)-mappings to the design of permutation array, we can construct an efficient permutation array (easy to encode and decode) with better code rate than previous results Chang (2005). IEEE Trans inf theory 51:359–365, Chang et al. (2003). IEEE Trans Inf Theory 49:1054–1059; Huang et al. (submitted)]. More precisely, we obtain that, for n ≥ 8, P(n, r) ≥ A(n − 2, r − 3) > A(n − 1,r − 2) = A(n, r − 1) when n is even and P(n, r) ≥ A(n − 2, r − 3) = A(n − 1, r − 2) > A(n, r − 1) when n is odd. This improves the best bound A(n − 1,r − 2) so far Huang et al. (submitted)] for n ≥ 8. The work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan under contract NSC-93-2213-E-009-117