On efficient m-ary balanced codes
Luca G. Tallini, Ugo Vaccaro · 2002
An m-ary balanced code is a code of length n over the alphabet Z/sub m/={0,1,..., m-1} such that each codeword is balanced; that is, the real sum of its components (or weight) is equal to [(m-1)n/2]. This paper contains new efficient methods to design m-ary balanced codes which improve the constructions found in the literature, for all alphabet size m/spl ges/2. To design such codes, the information words which are close to be balanced are encoded using single maps defined by a new generalization of Knuth's (1986) complementation method to the m-ary alphabet. Whereas, the remaining information words are compressed via some m-ary uniquely decodable variable length codes and then balanced using the saved space.