Error propagation assessment of enumerative coding schemes

Enumerative coding is an attractive algorithmic procedure for translating long source words into codewords and vice versa. The usage of long codewords makes it possible to approach a code rate which is as close as desired to Shannon's noiseless capacity of the constrained channel. Enumerative encoding is prone to massive error propagation as a single bit error could ruin entire decoded words. This contribution evaluates the effects of error propagation of the enumerative coding of runlength-limited sequences.