Error propagation assessment of enumerative coding schemes

Enumerative coding is an attractive algorithmic procedure for translating l ong source words into codewords and vice versa. The usage of long codewords makes it possible to approach a code rate which is as close as desired to Shannon's noiseless capacity of the constrained channel. Enumerative encodi ng is prone to massive error propagation as a single hit error could ruin e ntire decoded words. This contribution will evaluate the effects of error p ropagation of the enumerative coding of runlength-limited sequences.