On the distribution of runs of ones in binary strings

  • Authors:
  • Koushik Sinha;Bhabani P. Sinha

  • Affiliations:
  • Honeywell Technology Solutions, 151/1 Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore 560076, India;Indian Statistical Institute, 203 B. T. Road, Calcutta 700108, India

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Mathematics with Applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, we derive the number of binary strings which contain, for a given i"k, exactly i"k runs of 1's of length k in all possible binary strings of length n, 1@?k@?n. Such a knowledge about the distribution pattern of runs of 1's in binary strings is useful in many engineering applications - for example, data compression, bus encoding techniques to reduce crosstalk in VLSI chip design, computer arithmetic using redundant binary number system and design of energy-efficient communication schemes in wireless sensor networks by transformation of runs of 1's into compressed information patterns, among others. We present, here, a generating function based approach to derive a solution to this counting problem. Our experimental results demonstrate that, for most commonly used file formats, the observed distributions of exactly i"k runs of length k, 1@?k@?n, closely follow the theoretically derived distributions, for a given n. For n=8, we find that the experimentally obtained values for most file formats agree within +/-5% of the theoretically obtained values for all i"k runs of length k, 1@?k@?n. Also, the root mean square (RMS) values of these deviations across all file types studied in this paper are less than 5% for n=8. In view of these facts, the results presented in this paper could be useful in various application domains, like the ones mentioned above.