Optimal Ternary Cyclic Codes from Monomials

Cyclic codes are a subclass of linear codes and have applications in consumer electronics, data storage systems, and communication systems as they have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. Perfect nonlinear monomials were employed to construct optimal ternary cyclic codes with parameters $[3^m-1, 3^m-1-2m, 4]$ by Carlet, Ding and Yuan in 2005. In this paper, almost perfect nonlinear monomials, and a number of other monomials over $\gf(3^m)$ are used to construct optimal ternary cyclic codes with the same parameters. Nine open problems on such codes are also presented.