New Bounds on D-ary Optimal Codes

Gonzalo Navarro and Nieves Brisaboa

We propose a simple method that, given a symbol distribution, yields upper and lower bounds on the average code length of a D-ary optimal code over that distribution. Thanks to its simplicity, the method permits deriving analytical bounds for families of parametric distributions. We demonstrate this by obtaining new bounds, much better than the existing ones, for Zipf and exponential distributions when D>2.