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Horstein, Burnashev, Shayevitz and Feder, Naghshvar et al. and others have studied sequential transmission of a k-bit message over the binary symmetric channel (BSC) with full, noiseless feedback using posterior matching. Yang et al. provide an improved lower bound on the achievable rate using martingale analysis that relies on the small-enough difference (SED) partitioning introduced by Naghshvar et al. SED requires a relatively complex encoder and decoder. To reduce complexity, this paper replaces SED with relaxed constraints that admit the small enough absolute difference (SEAD) partitioning rule. The main analytical results show that achievable-rate bounds higher than those found by Yang et al. (2021) are possible even under the new constraints, which are less restrictive than SED. The new analysis does not use martingale theory for the confirmation phase and applies a surrogate channel technique to tighten the results. An initial systematic transmission further increases the achievable rate bound. The simplified encoder associated with SEAD has a complexity below order $O(K^{2})$ and allows simulations for message sizes of at least 1000 bits. For example, simulations achieve 99% of of the channel’s 0.50-bit capacity with an average block size of 200 bits for a target codeword error rate of $10^{-3}$ .

Recently, rate- $1/n$ zero-terminated (ZT) and tail-biting (TB) convolutional codes (CCs) with cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided list decoding have been shown to closely approach the random-coding union (RCU) bound for short blocklengths. This paper designs CRC polynomials for rate- $(n-1)/n$ ZT and TB CCs with short blocklengths. This paper considers both standard rate- $(n-1)/n$ CC polynomials and rate- $(n-1)/n$ designs resulting from puncturing a rate- $1/2$ code. The CRC polynomials are chosen to maximize the minimum distance $d_{\min }$ and minimize the number of nearest neighbors $A_{d_{\min }}$ . For the standard rate- $(n-1)/n$ codes, utilization of the dual trellis proposed by Yamada et al. lowers the complexity of CRC-aided serial list Viterbi decoding (SLVD). CRC-aided SLVD of the TBCCs closely approaches the RCU bound at a blocklength of 128. This paper compares the FER performance (gap to the RCU bound) and complexity of the CRC-aided standard and punctured ZTCCs and TBCCs. This paper also explores the complexity-performance trade-off for three TBCC decoders: a single-trellis approach, a multi-trellis approach, and a modified single-trellis approach with pre-processing using the wrap around Viterbi algorithm.