Generalized Balanced Tournament Packings and Optimal Equitable Symbol Weight Codes for Power Line Communications

Generalized balanced tournament packings (GBTPs) extend the concept of generalized balanced tournament designs introduced by Lamken and Vanstone (1989). In this paper, we establish the connection between GBTPs and a class of codes called equitable symbol weight codes (ESWCs). The latter were recently demonstrated to optimize the performance against narrowband noise in a general coded modulation scheme for power line communications. By constructing classes of GBTPs, we establish infinite families of optimal ESWCs with code lengths greater than alphabet size and whose narrowband noise error-correcting capability to code length ratios do not diminish to zero as the length grows. (C) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.