Transmission of Constant Weight Binary Sequences with Convolutional Codes and Maximum Likelihood Decoding

We study the performance of a communication system that uses linear convolutional codes for the transmission of binary sequences of fixed Hamming weight over the binary symmetric channel. The transmission method that we consider is the straightforward encoding of messages transmitted. We suggest a maximum likelihood decoding algorithm of received sequences. It is shown that this algorithm provides a more efficient tradeoff between the decoder implementation complexity and the decoding error probability than the performance of the two-stage encoding.