Asymptotic Improvement of the Gilbert-Varshamov Bound on the Size of Binary Codes

Given positive integers $n$ and $d$, let $A_2(n,d)$ denote the maximum size of a binary code of length $n$ and minimum distance $d$. The well-known Gilbert-Varshamov bound asserts that $A_2(n,d) \geq 2^n/V(n,d-1)$, where $V(n,d) = \sum_{i=0}^{d} {n \choose i}$ is the volume of a Hamming sphere of radius $d$. We show that, in fact, there exists a positive constant $c$ such that $$A_2(n,d) \geq c \frac{2^n}{V(n,d-1)} \log_2 V(n,d-1)$$ whenever $d/n \le 0.499$. The result follows by recasting the Gilbert- Varshamov bound into a graph-theoretic framework and using the fact that the corresponding graph is locally sparse. Generalizations and extensions of this result are briefly discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, submitted August 12, 2003, revised March 28, 200

A Generalized Gilbert-Varshamov Bound Derived via Analysis of a Code-Search Algorithm

This correspondence derives a generalization of the Gilbert- Varshamov bound that is applicable to block codes whose codewords must be drawn from irregular sets; the bound improves by a factor of four a similar result recently published by Kolesnik and Krachkovsky. It is derived by analyzing a code search algorithm we refer to as the "Altruistic Algorithm". This algorithm iteratively deletes potential codewords so that at each iteration the "worst" candidate is removed; the bound is derived by demonstrating that, as the algorithm proceeds, the average volume of a sphere of a given radius approaches the maximum such volume and so a bound previously expressed in terms of the maximum volume can in fact be expressed in terms of the average volume. Examples of applications where the bound is relevant include error-correcting (d, k)- constrained codes and binary codes for code division multiple access