A performance metric for codes with a high-order spectral null at zero frequency

Sum-variance is a well-known metric for assessing the performance of dc-free codes (first-order spectral-null codes), however, as we show in this paper, it is unsuitable for comparing the magnitude of spectral components of high-order spectral-null (HOSN) codes at low frequencies. In this paper, we introduce a new performance metric for evaluating the spectrum compression of arbitrarily HOSN codes around zero frequency; we call this metric the low-frequency spectrum weight (LFSW). We show that the asymptotic low-frequency spectral components of Kth-order spectral-null codes (K/spl ges/1) are exclusively determined by the order K and the LFSW, and that the LFSW equals the zero-frequency value in the spectrum of the corresponding sequence of Kth-order running digital sum values. We derive this result for symbol-by-symbol encoding, and then extend it to block HOSN codes. We then derive a closed-form expression for the LFSW of HOSN codes constructed through state-independent encoding. Closed-form expressions for LFSW of first-order zero-disparity codes and for the asymptotic LSFW of maxentropic dc-free sequences are also given.