An Efficient Construction Strategy for Near-Optimal Variable-Length Error-Correcting Codes

• Published in: IEEE communications letters Vol. 23; no. 3; pp. 398 - 401
• Main Authors: Chen, Yen-Ming, Wu, Feng-Tsang, Li, Chih-Peng, Varshney, Pramod K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Channel coding; Codes; Complexity theory; cross-entropy method; Entropy; Entropy (Information theory); Error correcting codes; Error correction; Error correction codes; Hamming distance; Joint source-channel coding (JSCC); Optimization; separate source-channel coding (SSCC); variable-length error-correcting (VLEC) codes
• ISSN: 1089-7798; 1558-2558
• DOI: 10.1109/LCOMM.2019.2891623

In this letter, we present an efficient cross-entropy (CE)-based algorithm for the design of variable-length error-correcting (VLEC) codes under the joint source and channel coding (JSCC) framework. The algorithm enables us to construct the near-optimal VLEC codes that have the minimum average codeword length (ACL) with low search complexity. The efficiency of the proposed CE-based algorithm makes it possible to construct the VLEC codes that have small ACL values under various free-distance constraints, especially for large-sized signal alphabets.