Minimizing the maximum codeword cost

The highly structured recursively constructed subsequence of optimal exhaustive code trees has been extended to the nonexhaustive case by focusing on the minimax optimality criterion instead of Varn´s (1971) original minimum average codeword cost criterion. When these two criteria give the same sequence of code trees, as they do under certain conditions on the costs, omitted here for conciseness, the recursive structure applies to Varn´s original problem as well