An Efficient Construction Strategy for Near-Optimal Variable-Length Error-Correcting Codes

In this letter, we present an efficient cross-entropy (CE)-based algorithm for the design of variable-length error-correcting (VLEC) codes under the joint source and channel coding (JSCC) framework. The algorithm enables us to construct the near-optimal VLEC codes that have the minimum average codeword length (ACL) with low search complexity. The efficiency of the proposed CE-based algorithm makes it possible to construct the VLEC codes that have small ACL values under various free-distance constraints, especially for large-sized signal alphabets.