A class of three-weight and five-weight linear codes

Recently, linear codes with few weights have been widely studied, since they have applications in data storage systems, communication systems and consumer electronics. In this paper, we present a class of three-weight and five-weight linear codes over Fp, where p is an odd prime and Fp denotes a finite field with p elements. The weight distributions of the linear codes constructed in this paper are also settled. Moreover, the linear codes illustrated in the paper may have applications in secret sharing schemes.