Deep Holes in Reed-Solomon Codes Based on Dickson Polynomials

For an $[n,k]$ Reed-Solomon code $\mathcal{C}$, it can be shown that any received word $r$ lies a distance at most $n-k$ from $\mathcal{C}$, denoted $d(r,\mathcal{C})\le n-k$. Any word $r$ meeting the equality is called a deep hole. Guruswami and Vardy (2005) showed that for a specific class of codes, determining whether or not a word is a deep hole is NP-hard. They suggested passingly that it may be easier when the evaluation set of $\mathcal{C}$ is large or structured. Following this idea, we study the case where the evaluation set is the image of a Dickson polynomial, whose values appear with a special uniformity. To find families of received words that are not deep holes, we reduce to a subset sum problem (or equivalently, a Dickson polynomial-variation of Waring’s problem) and find solution conditions by applying an argument using estimates on character sums indexed over the evaluation set.