Optimal Prefix Codes for Infinite Alphabets With Nonlinear Costs

Let P = {p(i)} be a measure of strictly positive probabilities on the set of nonnegative integers. Although the countable number of inputs prevents usage of the Huffman algorithm, there are nontrivial P for which known methods find a source code that is optimal in the sense of minimizing expected codeword length. For some applications, however, a source code should instead minimize one of a family of nonlinear objective functions, -exponential means, those of the form loga P i p(i)an(i) , where n(i) is the length of the ith codeword and a is a positive constant. Applications of such minimizations include a novel problem of maximizing the chance of message receipt in single-shot communications (a < 1) and a previously known problem of minimizing the chance of buffer overflow in a queueing system (a > 1). This paper introduces methods for finding codes optimal for such exponential means. One method applies to geometric distributions, while another applies to distributions with ligh...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TIT
• Authors: Michael B. Baer
• Keywords: Buffer Overflow, Nonlinear Objective Functions, Source Code, TIT 2008