New bounds of permutation codes under Hamming metric and Kendall’s \(\tau \)-metric

Permutation codes are widely studied objects due to their numerous applications in various areas, such as power line communications, block ciphers, and the rank modulation scheme for flash memories. Several kinds of metrics are considered for permutation codes according to their specific applications. This paper concerns some improvements on the bounds of permutation codes under Hamming metric and Kendall’s \(\tau \)-metric respectively, using mainly a graph coloring approach. Specifically, under Hamming metric, we improve the Gilbert–Varshamov bound asymptotically by a factor n, when the minimum Hamming distance d is fixed and the code length n goes to infinity. Under Kendall’s \(\tau \)-metric, we narrow the gap between the known lower bounds and upper bounds. Besides, we also obtain some sporadic results under Kendall’s \(\tau \)-metric for small parameters.