An Application of Cyclic Coding to Message Identification

In certain digital communication systems data is coded into cyclic code words for error correction or detection. To safeguard certain aspects of the system, all the code words of a message may have the same identifying pattern in a group of digits. This increases the redundancy of the message. This paper proposes a method of doing this using little or no redundancy. The message identification (MI) would be contained in a code syndrome which is added to each code word (except the first) of the message. These syndromes are ones that are unused for error correction by the cyclic code. Simple decoding procedures can determine if code words of different messages have been interchanged in certain parts of the system. Random and burst error correction codes are examined to determine suitable syndromes.