Error statistics of constrained codes on non-renewal burst channels

The statistics of the error process generated by a discrete super channel formed by the concatenation of a constrained encoder, a non-renewal finite state channel (FSC), and a constrained decoder is studied. First, recursions are developed for the error weight distribution. This statistics is relevant to the design of coding schemes and interleaving in concatenated systems. We also study the renewal nature of this residual error process as modified by the constrained decoder. It was conjectured Ferreira, Coetzee and Herro (1993) that if the channel model is a renewal FSC the super channel can be modeled as a similar renewal model. We use a statistics called the multigap distribution to analytically disprove this hypothesis.