On the existence of MDS codes over small fields with constrained generator matrices

We study the existence over small fields of Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes with generator matrices having specified supports (i.e. having specified locations of zero entries). This problem unifies and simplifies the problems posed in recent works of Yan and Sprintson (NetCod´13) on weakly secure cooperative data exchange, of Halbawi et al. (arxiv´13) on distributed Reed-Solomon codes for simple multiple access networks, and of Dau et al. (ISIT´13) on MDS codes with balanced and sparse generator matrices.We conjecture that there exist such [n, k]_q MDS codes as long as q ≥ n + k - 1, if the specified supports of the generator matrices satisfy the so-called MDS condition, which can be verified in polynomial time. We propose a combinatorial approach to tackle the conjecture, and prove that the conjecture holds for a special case when the sets of zero coordinates of rows of the generator matrix share with each other (pairwise) at most one common element. Based on our numerical result, the conjecture is also verified for all k ≤ 7. Our approach is based on a novel generalization of the well-known Hall´s marriage theorem, which allows (overlapping) multiple representatives instead of a single representative for each subset.