On relations between covering radius and dual distance

The covering radius of a code tells us how far in the sense of Hamming distance an arbitrary word of the ambient space can be from the code. For a few decades this parameter has been widely studied. In this paper we estimate the covering radius of a code when the dual distance is known. We derive a new bound on covering radii of linear codes. It improves essentially on the previously known estimates in a certain wide range. We also study asymptotic bounds on the cardinality of constant weight codes.