Some distance properties of tailbiting codes

The active tailbiting segment distance for convolutional codes is introduced. Together with the earlier defined active burst distance, it describes the error correcting capability of a tailbiting code encoded by a convolutional encoder. Lower bounds on the new active distance as well as an upper bound on the ratio between tailbiting length and memory of the encoder such that its minimum distance d_min equals the free distance d_free of the corresponding convolutional code are presented