Improved Gilbert-Varshamov bound for constrained systems

Nonconstructive existence results are obtained for block error-correcting codes whose codewords lie in a given constrained system. Each such system is defined as a set of words obtained by reading the labels of a finite directed labeled graph. For a prescribed constrained system and relative minimum distance delta , the new lower bounds on the rate of such codes improve on those derived recently by V.D. Kolesnik and V.Y. Krachkovsky (1991). The better bounds are achieved by considering a special subclass of sequences in the constrained system, namely, those having certain empirical statistics determined by delta .<
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