Balanced reconstruction codes for single edits

Motivated by the sequence reconstruction problem initiated by Levenshtein, reconstruction codes were introduced by Cai et al. to combat errors when a fixed number of noisy channels are available. The central problem on this topic is to design codes with sizes as large as possible, such that every codeword can be uniquely reconstructed from any N distinct noisy reads, where N is fixed. In this paper, we study binary reconstruction codes with the constraint that every codeword is balanced, which is a fundamental requirement in the technique of DNA-based storage. For all possible channels with a single edit error and their variants, we design asymptotically optimal balanced reconstruction codes for all N, and show that the number of their redundant symbols decreases from \(\frac{3}{2}\log _2 n+O(1)\) $\frac{3}{2}{log}_{2}n+O(1)$ to \(\frac{1}{2}\log _2n+\log _2\log _2n+O(1)\) $\frac{1}{2}{log}_{2}n+{log}_2{log}_{2}n+O(1)$ , and finally to \(\frac{1}{2}\log _2n+O(1)\) $\frac{1}{2}{log}_{2}n+O(1)$ but with different speeds, where n is the length of the code. Compared with the unbalanced case, our results imply that the balanced property does not reduce the rate of the reconstruction code in the corresponding codebook.