Mutually orthogonal frequency rectangles

A frequency rectangle of type FR$(m,n;q)$ is an $m \times n$ matrix such that each symbol from a set of size $q$ appears $n/q$ times in each row and $m/q$ times in each column. Two frequency rectangles of the same type are said to be orthogonal if, upon superimposition, each possible ordered pair of symbols appear the same number of times. A set of $k$ frequency rectangles in which every pair is orthogonal is called a set of mutually orthogonal frequency rectangles, denoted by $k$--MOFR$(m,n;q)$. We show that a $k$--MOFR$(2,2n;2)$ and an orthogonal array OA$(2n,k,2,2)$ are equivalent. We also show that an OA$(mn,k,2,2)$ implies the existence of a $k$--MOFR$(2m,2n;2)$. We construct $(4a-2)$--MOFR$(4,2a;2)$ assuming the existence of a Hadamard matrix of order $4a$. A $k$--MOFR$(m,n;q)$ is said to be $t$--orthogonal, if each subset of size $t$, when superimposed, contains each of the $q^t$ possible ordered $t$-tuples of entries exactly $mn/q^t$ times. A set of vectors over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ is said to be $t$-independent if each subset of size $t$ is linearly independent. We describe a method to obtain a set of $t$--orthogonal $k$--MOFR$(q^M, q^N, q)$ corresponding to a set of $t$--independent vectors in $(\mathbb{F}_q)^{M+N}$. We also discuss upper and lower bounds on the set of $t$--independent vectors and give a table of values for binary vectors of length $N \leq 16$. A frequency rectangle of type FR$(n,n;q)$ is called a frequency square and a set of $k$ mutually orthogonal frequency squares is denoted by $k$--MOFS$(n;q)$ or $k$--MOFS$(n)$ when there is no ambiguity about the symbol set. For $p$ an odd prime, we show that there exists a set of $(p-1)$ binary MOFS$(2p)$, hence improving the lower bounds in (Britz et al. 2020) for the previously known values for $p \geq 19$.