Statistical frame acquisition by co-ordinated use of error control redundancy.

In digital communications systems a number of approaches have been used to achieve reliable framing of the encoded information stream at the receiver; as for instance comma codes, addition of extra synchronization bits,etc. This study deals with the problem of acquiring frame synchronization by means of error control redundancy, when a fixed length binary cyclic code (n,k) is used to transmit encoded information through a relatively clean binary symmetric channel. The technique developed, herein, makes use of the statistical properties of zero syndrome as associated with various slips "s" (where 0\(sx<n), in particular, when coset polynomials are used for optimization. Both, analysis of the technique as well as experimental results obtained by simulation, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a number of different algorithms, are presented in detail. Finally, the technique proves to be effective even for transition probabilities close to those yielding the channel's capacity.