Abstract
The paper deals with the code length distributions for which the proportion of the codewords of a given length to all words of this length is a suitable power of 1/2. We derive a lower bound and an upper bound for the number of prefix codes with the above property. We also investigate the ratio of prefix codes to all uniquely decodable codes, which relates to the more general results of Woryna (Discret Math 340(2):51–57, 2017; Discret Appl Math 244:205–213, 2018).
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Good I.J., Abramson N.: Information theory and coding. J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. A (General) 127(3), 454 (1964).
McMillan B.: Two inequalities implied by unique decipherability. IRE Trans. Inf. Theory 2(4), 115–116 (1956).
Parkash O., Kakkar P.: Optimum probability distribution for minimum redundancy of source coding. Appl. Math. 5(1), 96–105 (2014).
Singh P., Amini A., Marvasti F., et al.: Set of uniquely decodable codes for overloaded synchronous CDMA. IET Commun. 10(10), 1236–1245 (2016).
Woryna A.: On the set of uniquely decodable codes with a given sequence of code word lengths. Discret. Math. 340(2), 51–57 (2017).
Woryna A.: On the ratio of prefix codes to all uniquely decodable codes with a given length distribution. Discret. Appl. Math. 244, 205–213 (2018).
Yeung R.W.: Information Theory and Network Coding. Springer, New York (2008).
Yin, H., Ng, K.H., Yu, T.S., et al.: Decision procedure for the existence of two-channel prefix-free codes. In: 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). IEEE (2019).
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the referees for their very careful reading on this paper and helpful comments. This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (No. 2020030254).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Communicated by L. Storme.
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Xu, J., Zheng, Z., Tian, K. et al. Two properties of prefix codes and uniquely decodable codes. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 91, 3321–3330 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-023-01253-1
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-023-01253-1