M. Blaum et J. Bruck, CODING FOR DELAY-INSENSITIVE COMMUNICATION WITH PARTIAL SYNCHRONIZATION, IEEE transactions on information theory, 40(3), 1994, pp. 941-945
Citations number
13
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Engineering, Eletrical & Electronic
Assume that information is transmitted in parallel among many lines in
such a way that an electrical transition represents a 1 and an absenc
e of a transition represents a 0. The propagation delay in the wires v
aries and results in asynchronous reception. The challenge is to find
an efficient communication scheme that will be delay-insensitive. One
of the common solutions to this problem is to use a handshake mechanis
m. Namely, the transmitter sends the next vector only after getting an
acknowledgment that the current vector was received. A natural questi
on is: how does the receiver know that reception of the current vector
is complete? This problem was solved by Verhoeff by using the so-call
ed unordered codes. However, in practice, it is common that the commun
ication lines are arranged in pairs (double-rail) such that the propag
ation delay on the lines within a pair is identical. In general, the l
ines can be arranged in groups (of size larger than 1) where transmiss
ion within a group is synchronized. We have created a few delay-insens
itive schemes that take advantage of partial synchronization within gr
oups. To achieve that, we have generalized to arbitrary alphabets the
following known results: Sperner's theorem on unordered sets, Henry-Kn
uth's construction of balanced codes, and Berger's construction of uno
rdered codes. Finally, we have focused on practice, and constructed a
code that uses double-rail channels but has the advantage that it is a
rate 3/4 code as opposed to the rate 1/2 double-rail code (that is th
e common code being used in real systems).