Efficient Encoding of Binary Constant-Weight Codes: Variable-Length Balancing Schemes à La Knuth

We study and propose schemes that map messages onto constant-weight codewords using variable-length prefixes. We provide polynomial-time computable formulas that estimate the average number of redundant bits incurred by our schemes. In addition to the exact formulas, we also perform an asymptotic analysis and demonstrate that our scheme uses
$\frac {1}2 \log _{2} n+O(1)$
redundant bits to encode messages into length-
$n$
words with weight
$(n/2)+ {\mu }$
for constant
${\mu }$
. We also propose schemes that map messages into balanced codebooks with error-correcting capabilities. For such schemes, we provide methods to enumerate the average number of redundant bits.