On Minimal Distance between q-ary Plateaued Functions

It is proved that the Hamming distance between distinct binary s-plateaued functions of n variables is not less than 2 s+n-2/2 and the Hamming distance between distinct ternary s-plateaued functions of n variables is not less than 3 s+n-1/2. It is shown that this bound is tight. Constructions and some properties of q-ary plateaued functions are discussed.