The Weight Enumerator of Three Families of Cyclic Codes

Cyclic codes are a subclass of linear codes and have wide applications in consumer electronics, data storage systems, and communication systems due to their efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. Cyclic codes with many zeros and their dual codes have been a subject of study for many years. However, their weight distributions are known only for a very small number of cases. In general, the calculation of the weight distribution of cyclic codes is heavily based on the evaluation of some exponential sums over finite fields. Very recently, Li et al. studied a class of p-ary cyclic codes of length p(2m) - 1, where is a prime and is odd. They determined the weight distribution of this class of cyclic codes by establishing a connection between the involved exponential sums with the spectrum of Hermitian forms graphs. In this paper, this class of p-ary cyclic codes is generalized and the weight distribution of the generalized cyclic codes is settled for both even and odd along with the idea of Li et al. The weight distributions of two related families of cyclic codes are also determined.