Hamming weights in irreducible cyclic codes (Q1937555)

In this paper, the authors give a survey of earlier results on the weight distributions of irreducible cyclic codes and obtain some extensions and generalizations of these earlier results. They give a complete characterization of one-weight irreducible cyclic codes (that extends an earlier result obtained by \textit{G. Vega} and \textit{J. Wolfmann} [Des. Codes Cryptography 42, No. 3, 327--334 (2007; Zbl 1132.94011)]. Some examples for weight distributions of one-, two-, three-, and four-weight codes over different fields are given. Also, the authors obtain a lower and upper bound of irreducible cyclic codes.