Bounds on the Essential Covering Radius of Constrained Systems

Motivated by applications for error-correcting constrained codes, we study the essential covering radius of constrained systems. In a recent work, the essential covering radius was suggested as new fundamental parameter of constrained systems that characterizes the error-correction capabilities of the quantized-constraint concatenation (QCC) scheme. We provide general efficiently computable upper-bounds on the essential covering radius using Markov chains and sliding-block codes, which in some cases, we show to be tight.