Griesmer bound
In the mathematics of coding theory, the Griesmer bound, named after James Hugo Griesmer, is a bound on the length of binary codes of dimension k and minimum distance d. There is also a very similar version for non-binary codes.
Statement of the bound
For a binary linear code, the Griesmer bound is:
Proof
Let denote the minimum length of a binary code of dimension k and distance d. Let C be such a code. We want to show that
Let G be a generator matrix of C. We can always suppose that the first row of G is of the form r = (1, ..., 1, 0, ..., 0) with weight d.
The matrix generates a code , which is called the residual code of has obviously dimension and length has a distance but we don't know it. Let be such that . There exists a vector such that the concatenation Then On the other hand, also since and is linear: But
so this becomes . By summing this with we obtain . But so we get This implies
therefore due to the integrality of
so that
By induction over k we will eventually get
Note that at any step the dimension decreases by 1 and the distance is halved, and we use the identity
for any integer a and positive integer k.
The bound for the general case
For a linear code over , the Griesmer bound becomes:
The proof is similar to the binary case and so it is omitted.
See also
- Singleton bound
- Hamming bound
- Gilbert-Varshamov bound
- Johnson bound
- Plotkin bound
- Elias Bassalygo bound
References
- J. H. Griesmer, "A bound for error-correcting codes," IBM Journal of Res. and Dev., vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 532-542, 1960.