In applied mathematics, the
Johnson bound (named after Selmer Martin Johnson) is a limit on the size of error-correcting codes, as used in
coding theory for data transmission or communications.
Definition
Let
be a
q-ary
code of length
, i.e. a subset of
. Let
be the minimum distance of
, i.e.
where is the Hamming distance between and .
Let be the set of all q-ary codes with length and minimum distance and let denote the set of codes in such that every element has exactly nonzero entries.
Denote by the number of elements in . Then, we define to be the largest size of a code with length and minimum distance :
Similarly, we define to be the largest size of a code in :
Theorem 1 (Johnson bound for ):
If ,