Using a tree algorithm to determine the average synchronisation delay of self-synchronising T-codes

First proposed in 1984, T-codes are a class of variable-length codes that exhibit exceptional tendency towards self-synchronisation. A number of industrial applications have been reported, ranging from moving-picture images to boundary markers. A number of attempts have been made to quantify the synchronisation performance of different T-codes. The first complete analytical method for calculating average synchronisation delays of T-codes was published in 1996 and refined in 1998. However, the computational efficiency of that algorithm is not optimal, notably when suffix conditions are encountered during the decoding process. The authors present a significant improvement on that algorithm. With the new method, computational efficiency is improved by reducing the average time required per code set. It produces average synchronisation delay values in less than one quarter of the time required by the original method to generate comparable results. Consequently, higher-degree code sets, which have wide-ranging practical applications, can have their sync performance analysed and compared