A method and communication system has been developed to increase the number of messages sent over a bandwidth limited channel and/or under noisy conditions by using a variable message length encoding and decoding scheme. With this technique, the messages having a higher probability of being sent are shorter as compared to the messages that are less likely to be sent under the current conditions. With this technique, a higher number of transactions per unit of time can be communicated and/or executed over a given bandwidth limited channel. When the transmitted message is received, the receiver does not know the message length, but the receiver deduces the length by using information from various error detection and correction techniques, such as forward error correction (FEC) and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) techniques.