Bounds on Size of Homopolymer Free Codes

Abstract

For any given alphabet of size $q$, a Homopolymer Free code (HF code) refers to an $(n, M, d)_q$ code of length $n$, size $M$ and minimum Hamming distance $d$, where all the codewords are homopolymer free sequences. For any given alphabet, this work provides upper and lower bounds on the maximum size of any HF code using Sphere Packing bound and Gilbert-Varshamov bound. Further, upper and lower bounds on the maximum size of HF codes for various HF code families are calculated. Also, as a specific case, upper and lower bounds are obtained on the maximum size of homopolymer free DNA codes.