Cross-Bifix-Free Codes Within a Constant Factor of Optimality

A cross-bifix-free code is a set of words in which no prefix of any length of any word is the suffix of any word in the set. Cross-bifix-free codes arise in the study of distributed sequences for frame synchronization. We provide a new construction of cross-bifix-free codes which generalizes the construction by Bajic to longer code lengths and to any alphabet size. The codes are shown to be nearly optimal in size. We also establish new results on Fibonacci sequences, which are used in estimating the size of the cross-bifix-free codes.