We determine several variants of the classical interpolation formula for finite fields which produce polynomials that induce a desirable mapping on the nonspecified elements, and without increasing the number of terms in the formula. As a corollary, we classify those permutation polynomials over a finite field which are their own compositional inverse, extending work of C. Wells.

Let ${ \mathbb{F} }_{q} $ be the finite field of characteristic $p$ containing $q= {p}^{r} $ elements and $f(x)= a{x}^{n} + {x}^{m} $, a binomial with coefficients in this field. If some conditions on the greatest common divisor of $n- m$ and $q- 1$ are satisfied then this polynomial does not permute the elements of the field. We prove in particular that if $f(x)= a{x}^{n} + {x}^{m} $ permutes ${ \mathbb{F} }_{p} $, where $n\gt m\gt 0$ and $a\in { \mathbb{F} }_{p}^{\ast } $, then $p- 1\leq (d- 1)d$, where $d= \gcd (n- m, p- 1)$, and that this bound of $p$, in terms of $d$ only, is sharp. We show as well how to obtain in certain cases a permutation binomial over a subfield of ${ \mathbb{F} }_{q} $ from a permutation binomial over ${ \mathbb{F} }_{q} $.

Frequency hopping sequences sets are required in frequency hopping code division multiple access systems. For the anti-jamming purpose, frequency hopping sequences are required to have a large linear span. In this paper, by using a permutation polynomial δ(x) over a finite field, we transform several optimal sets of frequency hopping sequences with small linear span into ones with large linear span. The exact values of the linear span are presented by using the methods of counting the terms of the sequences representations. The results show that the transformed frequency hopping sequences are optimal with respect to the Peng-Fan bound, and can resist the analysis of Berlekamp-Massey algorithm.