Computer Science – Information Theory
Scientific paper
2007-09-17
Computer Science
Information Theory
Scientific paper
In this survey we concern ourself with the question, wether there exists a fix-free code for a given sequence of codeword lengths. For a given alphabet, we obtain the {\em Kraftsum} of a code, if we divide for every length the number of codewords of this length in the code by the total number of all possible words of this length and then take summation over all codeword lengths which appears in the code. The same way the Kraftsum of a lengths sequence $(l_1,..., l_n) $ is given by $\sum_{i=1}^n q^{-l_i} $, where $q$ is the numbers of letters in the alphabet. Kraft and McMillan have shown in \cite{kraft} (1956), that there exists a prefix-free code with codeword lengths of a certain lengths sequence, if the Kraftsum of the lengths sequence is smaller than or equal to one. Furthermore they have shown, that the converse also holds for all (uniquely decipherable) codes.\footnote{In this survey a code means a set of words, such that any message which is encoded with these words can be uniquely decoded. Therefore we omit in future the "uniquely decipherable" and write only "code".} The question rises, if Kraft's and McMillan's result can be generalized to other types of codes? Throughout, we try to give an answer on this question for the class of fix-free codes. Since any code has Kraftsum smaller than or equal to one, this answers the question for the second implication of Kraft-McMillan's theorem. Therefore we pay attention mainly to the first implication.
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