Locally repairable codes have recently been applied in distributed storage systems because of their excellent local erasure-correction capability. A locally repairable code is a code with locality r, where each code symbol can be recovered by accessing at most r other code symbols. In this paper, we study the existence and construction of binary cyclic codes with locality 2. An overview of best binary cyclic LRCs with length 7≤n≤87 and locality 2 are summarized here.

This paper considers the optimal generator matrices of a given binary cyclic code over a binary symmetric channel with crossover probability p→0 when the goal is to minimize the probability of an information bit error. A given code has many encoder realizations and the information bit error probability is a function of this realization. Our goal here is to seek the optimal realization of encoding functions by taking advantage of the structure of the codes, and to derive the probability of information bit error when possible. We derive some sufficient conditions for a binary cyclic code to have systematic optimal generator matrices under bounded distance decoding and determine many cyclic codes with such properties. We also present some binary cyclic codes whose optimal generator matrices are non-systematic under complete decoding.

Relations between well-known bounds for the minimum distance of binary cyclic codes such as BCH bound (dBCH), HT bound (dHT) and new bounds dA, dB proposed recently by Shen et al. are investigated. We prove firstly dBCH dA and secondly dHT dB. We also give binary cyclic codes which satisfy dA dHT.