Error-block codes and poset metrics

Let P = ({1, 2,..., n}, <=) be a poset, let V-1, V-2,...,V-n, be a family of finite-dimensional spaces over a finite field F-q and let V = V-1 circle plus V-2 circle plus ... V-n. In this paper we endow V with a poset metric such that the P-weight is constant on the non-null vectors of a component V-i, extending both the poset metric introduced by Brualdi et al. and the metric for linear error-block codes introduced by Feng et al.. We classify all poset block structures which admit the extended binary Hamming code [8; 4; 4] to be a one-perfect poset block code, and present poset block structures that turn other extended Hamming codes and the extended Golay code [24; 12; 8] into perfect codes. We also give a complete description of the groups of linear isometrics of these metric spaces in terms of a semi-direct product, which turns out to be similar to the case of poset metric spaces. In particular, we obtain the group of linear isometrics of the error-block metric spaces.