Decoders minimizing the Euclidean distance between the received word and the candidate codewords are known to be optimal for channels suffering from Gaussian noise. However, when the stored or transmitted signals are also corrupted by an unknown offset, other decoders may perform better. In particular, applying the Euclidean distance on normalized words makes the decoding result independent of the offset. The use of this distance measure calls for alternative code design criteria in order to get good performance in the presence of both noise and offset. In this context, various adapted versions of classical binary block codes are proposed, such as (i) cosets of linear codes, (ii) (unions of) constant weight codes, and (iii) unordered codes. It is shown that considerable performance improvements can be achieved, particularly when the offset is large compared to the noise.

Maximum likelihood (ML) decision criteria have been developed for channels suffering from signal independent offset mismatch. Here, such criteria are considered for signal dependent offset, which means that the value of the offset may differ for distinct signal levels rather than being the same for all levels. An ML decision criterion is derived, assuming uniform distributions for both the noise and the offset. In particular, for the proposed ML decoder, bounds are determined on the standard deviations of the noise and the offset which lead to a word error rate equal to zero. Simulation results are presented confirming the findings.

We consider noisy data transmission channels with unknown scaling and varying offset mismatch. Minimum Pearson distance detection is used in cooperation with a difference operator, which offers immunity to such mismatch. Pair-constrained codes are proposed for unambiguous decoding, where in each codeword certain adjacent symbol pairs must appear at least once. We investigate the cardinality and redundancy of these codes.

Reliability is a critical issue for modern multi-level cell memories. We consider a multi-level cell channel model such that the retrieved data is not only corrupted by Gaussian noise, but hampered by scaling and offset mismatch as well. We assume that the intervals from which the scaling and offset values are taken are known, but no further assumptions on the distributions on these intervals are made. We derive maximum likelihood (ML) decoding methods for such channels, based on finding a codeword that has closest Euclidean distance to a specified set defined by the received vector and the scaling and offset parameters. We provide geometric interpretations of scaling and offset and also show that certain known criteria appear as special cases of our general setting.