English

On the ratio of prefix codes to all uniquely decodable codes with a given length distribution

Combinatorics 2018-04-17 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

We investigate the ratio ρn,L\rho_{n,L} of prefix codes to all uniquely decodable codes over an nn-letter alphabet and with length distribution LL. For any integers n2n\geq 2 and m1m\geq 1, we construct a lower bound and an upper bound for infLρn,L\inf_L\rho_{n,L}, the infimum taken over all sequences LL of length mm for which the set of uniquely decodable codes with length distribution LL is non-empty. As a result, we obtain that this infimum is always greater than zero. Moreover, for every m1m\geq 1 it tends to 1 when nn\to\infty, and for every n2n\geq 2 it tends to 0 when mm\to\infty. In the case m=2m=2, we also obtain the exact value for this infimum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.02531,
  title  = {On the ratio of prefix codes to all uniquely decodable codes with a given length distribution},
  author = {Adam Woryna},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.02531},
  year   = {2018}
}