Dictionary of Electrical Engineering

Commonly used terms in the Electrical industry.

tail biting
a frame-by-frame transmission scheme for which the data is convolution-ally encoded so that the encoder begins and ends in the same state, which, however, is unknown to the decoder. The advantage of this scheme is that no tail (overhead) is added to the data to force the encoder into a (by the decoder) known state. Compare with fractional rate loss.