Design of synchronisation and error-correcting codes

Abstract

From earlier developments in coding theory, system designers were preoccupied with the synchronisation of the codewords as much as they were concerned with other external factors, such as additive noise. Global optimisation techniques such as the Greedy Algorithm, Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms are taken into consideration in this thesis for the construction of satisfactory synchronisation error-correcting codes. The latter two methods proposed prove more complex to implement but are also regarded as more likely to find the best solutions and this will be put to test when simulating and comparing the output to existing results. The performance of the codes is dependent on the minimum Levenshtein distance which caters for insertions, deletions and substitutions in the transmission of the codewords.