Codes with a Disparity Property

Kth order zero disparity codes have been considered in several recent papers. In the first part of this paper we remove the zero disparity condition and consider the larger class of codes, Kth order disparity D codes. We establish properties of disparity D codes showing that they have many of the properties of zero disparity codes. We give existence criteria for them, and discuss how new codewords may be formed from ones already known. We then discuss Kth order disparity D codes that have the same number of codewords. We discuss the minimum distance properties of these new codes and present a decoding algorithm for them. In the second part of the paper we look at how the minimum distance of disparity D codes can be improved. We consider subsets of a very specialised subclass, namely first order zero disparity codes over alphabet Aq of size q. These particular subsets have q codewords of length n and minimum Hamming distance n. We show that such a subset exists when q is even and nis a multiple of 4, and also when q is odd and n is even. These subsets have the best error correction capabilities of any subset of q first order zero disparity codewords.