An improvement to the bit stuffing algorithm

The bit stuffing algorithm is a technique for coding constrained sequences by the insertion of bits into an arbitrary data sequence. This approach was previously introduced and applied to (d,k) constrained codes. Results show that the maximum average rate of the bit stuffing code achieves capacity when k=d+1 or k=/spl infin/, while it is suboptimal for all other (d,k) pairs. Furthermore, this technique was generalized to produce codes with an average rate that achieves capacity for all (d,k) pairs. However, this extension results in a more complicated scheme. This correspondence proposes a modification to the bit stuffing algorithm that maintains its simplicity. We show analytically that the proposed algorithm achieves improved average rates over bit stuffing for most (d,k) constraints. We further determine all constraints for which this scheme produces codes with an average rate equal to the Shannon capacity.