Generalized Balanced Tournament Packings and Optimal Equitable Symbol Weight Codes for Power Line Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces generalized balanced tournament packings (GBTPs) and demonstrates their use in constructing optimal equitable symbol weight codes, which improve power line communication performance against narrowband noise.

Contribution

It establishes a novel connection between GBTPs and equitable symbol weight codes, providing infinite families of optimal codes with favorable error-correcting properties.

Findings

Constructed infinite families of optimal equitable symbol weight codes.

Codes have error-correcting capabilities that do not diminish with increasing length.

Enhanced performance against narrowband noise in power line communications.

Abstract

Generalized balance tournament packings (GBTPs) extend the concept of generalized balanced tournament designs introduced by Lamken and Vanstone (1989). In this paper, we establish the connection between GBTPs and a class of codes called equitable symbol weight codes. The latter were recently demonstrated to optimize the performance against narrowband noise in a general coded modulation scheme for power line communications. By constructing classes of GBTPs, we establish infinite families of optimal equitable symbol weight codes with code lengths greater than alphabet size and whose narrowband noise error-correcting capability to code length ratios do not diminish to zero as the length grows.