The weight distributions of some cyclic codes with three or four nonzeros over F3

Because of efficient encoding and decoding algorithms, cyclic codes are an important family of linear block codes, and have applications in communica- tion and storage systems. However, their weight distributions are known only for a few cases mainly on the codes with one or two nonzeros. In this paper, the weight distributions of two classes of cyclic codes with three or four nonzeros are determined.