Chapter

Channel Coding and Decoding:

Part 1–Block Coding and Decoding

W e’re now near the midpoint of the book. This chapter is all about what’s known as
channel coding, and its partner, channel decoding. We’ll start with a brief
overview of the meaning of the words channel coding and channel decoding.
First, in Figure 6.1 you’ll see a device called the channel coder, located right in
the middle of the source encoder and the modulator. (It is this device that performs
channel coding.) If you look at the input to the channel coder, you’ll see that it is a
stream of bits, and its output is also a stream of bits. This leads us to an intriguing
question. Why would somebody introduce a device that takes in a stream of bits and
puts out a stream of bits? To answer this question, we need to look a little more closely
at what the channel coder does: It takes each set of k incoming bits and maps it into a
set of n outgoing bits, where n is greater than k. The extra n – k bits introduced into
the bit stream by the channel coder are added so that we can detect transmission
errors and/or remove transmission errors at the receiver side.

TRANSMITTER

Source Channel Modulator ...

x(t) encoder coder s(t) sent
for example, bits bits across
speech signal for example, for example, channel
101 101110

Figure 6.1 Introducing the channel coder