Modern information and communication systems are based on the reliable and efficient transmission of information. Channels encountered in practical applications are usually disturbed regardless of whether they correspond to information transmission over noisy and time-variant mobile radio channels or to information transmission on optical discs that might be damaged by scratches. Owing to these disturbances, appropriate channel coding schemes have to be employed such that errors within the transmitted information can be detected or even corrected. To this end, channel coding theory provides suitable coding schemes for error detection and error correction. Besides good code characteristics with respect to the number of errors that can be detected or corrected, the complexity of the architectures used for implementing the encoding and decoding algorithms is important for practical applications.
The present book provides a concise overview of channel coding theory and practice as well as the accompanying algorithms, architectures and applications. The selection of the topics presented in this book is oriented towards those subjects that are relevant for information and communication systems in use today or in the near future. The focus is on those aspects of coding theory that are important for the understanding of these systems. This book places emphasis on the algorithms for encoding and decoding and their architectures, as well as the applications of the corresponding coding schemes in a unified framework.
The idea for this book originated from a two-day seminar on coding theory in the industrial context. We have tried to keep this seminar style in the book by highlighting the most important facts within the figures and by restricting the scope to the most important topics with respect to the applications of coding theory, especially within communication systems. This also means that many important and interesting topics could not be covered in order to be as concise as possible.
The target audience for the book are students of communication and information engi- neering as well as computer science at universities and also applied mathematicians who are interested in a presentation that subsumes theory and practice of coding theory without sac- rificing exactness or relevance with regard to real-world practical applications. Therefore, this book is well suited for engineers in industry who want to know about the theoretical basics of coding theory and their application in currently relevant communication systems. The book is organised as follows. In Chapter 1 a brief overview of the principle architecture of a communication system is given and the information theory fundamentals underlying coding theory are summarised. The most important concepts of information the- ory, such as entropy and channel capacity as well as simple channel models, are described.
