An Elementary Approach to MacWilliams Extension Property and Constant Weight Code with Respect to Weighted Hamming Metric

Abstract

In this paper, we characterize the MacWilliams extension property (MEP) and constant weight codes with respect to $\omega$-weight defined on $\mathbb{F}^{\Omega}$ via an elementary approach, where $\mathbb{F}$ is a finite field, $\Omega$ is a finite set, and $\omega:\Omega\longrightarrow\mathbb{R}^{+}$ is a weight function. Our approach relies solely on elementary linear algebra and two key identities for $\omega$-weight of subspaces derived from a double-counting argument. When $\omega$ is the constant $1$ map, our results recover two well-known results for Hamming metric code: (1) any Hamming weight preserving map between linear codes extends to a Hamming weight isometry of the entire ambient space; and (2) any constant weight Hamming metric code is a repetition of the dual of Hamming code.