Constructions of MDS symbol-pair codes with minimum distance seven or eight

Symbol-pair codes are proposed to guard against pair-errors in symbol-pair read channels. The minimum symbol-pair distance plays a vital role in determining the error-correcting capability and the constructions of symbol-pair codes with largest possible minimum symbol-pair distance is of great importance. Maximum distance separable (MDS) symbol-pair codes are optimal in the sense that such codes can acheive the Singleton bound. In this paper, for length 5p, two new classes of MDS symbol-pair codes with minimum symbol-pair distance seven or eight are constructed by utilizing repeated-root cyclic codes over $${\mathbb {F}}_{p}$$ , where p is a prime. In addition, we derive a class of MDS symbol-pair codes with minimum symbol-pair distance seven and length 4p.