Methods to Generate Multiple-valued Bent Functions of an odd Number of Variables

Methods to generate p-valued bent functions of an odd number of variables are addressed. An extension of the Maiorana method originally developed to generate bent functions of an even number of variables is presented. It is shown that the simplest Maiorana function may be used to generate a large number of bent functions of an odd number of variables using as parameters a 1-place bent function, a random permutation matrix and the value vector of a random p-valued function.