On shortened and punctured cyclic codes

Abstract. The problem of identifying whether the family of cyclic codes is asymptotically good or not is a long-standing open problem in the field of coding theory. It is known in the literature that some families of cyclic codes such as BCH codes and Reed-Solomon codes are asymptotically bad, however in general the answer to this question is not known. A recent result by Nelson and Van Zwam shows that, all linear codes can be obtained by a sequence of puncturing and/or shortening of a collection of asymptotically good codes [1]. In this paper, we prove that any linear code can be obtained by a sequence of puncturing and/or shortening of some cyclic code. Therefore the result that all codes can be obtained by shortening and/or puncturing cyclic codes leaves the possibility open that cyclic codes are asymptotically good.