Generalization of Huffman coding to minimize the probability of buffer overflow

An algorithm is given to find a prefix condition code that minimizes the value of the moment generating function of its codeword length distribution for a given positive argument. This algorithm is used in an iterative way to yield a code that maximizes the rate of decay of the probability of buffer overflow as the buffer length increases. * This paper was presented at the 1977 International Symposium on Information Theory, Ithaca, N.Y. This work was supported in part by a Frank A. Cowan Scholarship and in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Grant N00014-75-C-1183. It is part of a dissertation submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. The author is with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139