Error Control Coding: An Overview

Abstract

Reliable transmission of information is one of the central topics in digital communications. While the advent of powerful digital computing and storage technologies has made the data traffic increasingly digital, the reality of inherently noisy communication channels persists and has thus made error control coding an important and necessary step in achieving reliable communication. Coding in this case refers to systematically introducing redundancy in a message prior to transmission and using this redundancy to recover the original message from the erroneously received one. There are two basic types of error control codes: block codes and convolutional codes. Convolutional codes, techniques for decoding them and their applications are the focus of this book. This introductory chapter begins with a brief historical background of the development of information theory, a field of study that established the utility of error control coding.