Many linear codes with two or three weights have recently been constructed due to their applications in consumer electronics, communication, data storage system, secret sharing, authentication codes, association schemes, and strongly regular graphs. In this paper, two classes of p-ary linear codes with two or three weights are presented. The first class of linear codes with two or three weights is obtained from a certain non-quadratic function. The second class of linear codes with two weights is obtained from the images of a certain function on $mathbb{F}_{p^m}$. In some cases, the resulted linear codes are optimal in the sense that they meet the Griesmer bound.

As an optimal combinatorial object, cyclic perfect Mendelsohn difference family (CPMDF) was introduced by Fuji-Hara and Miao to construct optimal optical orthogonal codes. In this paper, we propose a direct construction of disjoint CPMDFs from the Zeng-Cai-Tang-Yang cyclotomy. Compared with a recent work of Fan, Cai, and Tang, our construction doesn't need to depend on a cyclic difference matrix. Furthermore, strictly optimal frequency-hopping sequences (FHSs) are a kind of optimal FHSs which has optimal Hamming auto-correlation for any correlation window. As an application of our disjoint CPMDFs, we present more flexible combinatorial constructions of strictly optimal FHSs, which interpret the previous construction proposed by Cai, Zhou, Yang, and Tang.

As a generalization of perfect nonlinear (PN) functions, zero-difference balanced (ZDB) functions play an important role in coding theory, cryptography and communications engineering. Inspired by a foregoing work of Liu et al. [1], we present a class of ZDB functions with new parameters based on the cyclotomy in finite fields. Employing these ZDB functions, we obtain simultaneously optimal constant composition codes and perfect difference systems of sets.