The Hamming Distances of a Class of p-Ary Negacyclic Codes

Based on the construction of a new distance-preserving Gray map from ((F_p + uF_p)^N, Gray distance) to (the corresponding Gray images in F_p^pN, Hamming distance) and the calculation of Gray distances of (u-1)-constacyclic codes over F_p + uF_p, a bound for the Hamming distances of a class of negacyclic codes with length pN over F_p is obtained, which is more tighter than Singleton bound. Further more, the exact Hamming distances of some p-ary negacyclic codes are determined from this bound, some of which cannot be got from Dinh's work published on Finite Fields and Their Applications in 2008.