Estimating the Sizes of Binary Error-Correcting Constrained Codes

In this paper, we study binary constrained codes that are also resilient to bit-flip errors and erasures. In our first approach, we compute the sizes of constrained subcodes of linear codes. Since there exist well-known linear codes that achieve vanishing probabilities of error over the binary symmetric channel (which causes bit-flip errors) and the binary erasure channel, constrained subcodes of such linear codes are also resilient to random bit-flip errors and erasures. We employ a simple identity from the Fourier analysis of Boolean functions, which transforms the problem of counting constrained codewords of linear codes to a question about the structure of the dual code. Via examples of constraints, we illustrate the utility of our method in providing explicit values or efficient algorithms for our counting problem. Our second approach is to obtain good upper bounds on the sizes of the largest constrained codes that can correct a fixed number of combinatorial errors or erasures. We accomplish this using an extension of Delsarte's linear program (LP) to the setting of constrained systems. We observe that the numerical values of our LP-based upper bounds beat those obtained by using the generalized sphere packing bounds of Fazeli, Vardy, and Yaakobi (2015).