Construction of minimal sets for capacity-approaching variable-length constrained sequence codes

A novel approach to design capacity-approaching variable-length constrained sequence codes has recently been developed. A critical step in this design process is the construction of minimal sets based on a finite state machine description of the encoders. In this paper we propose three generalized criteria to select the state that will result in construction of the minimal set with the best achievable code rate. Both complete and incomplete minimal sets are considered when developing criteria to select the appropriate state. We construct constrained sequence codes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed construction criteria.