Digital Signal Processing 101

CHAPTER 12Error Correction Coding

This chapter provides an introduction to error correction coding and decoding. This process is also known as forward error correction, or FEC. This field is very complex and even has its own set of mathematics. A thorough understanding also requires background in probability and statistics theory, which is necessary to quantify the performance of any given coding method. Most texts on this topic delve into this math to some degree. Appendix E on binary field arithmetic gives a very quick, very basic, summary of the little Boolean arithmetic we use in this chapter.

As for the approach here, we skip nearly all mathematics and try to give an intuitive feel for the basics of coding and decoding. This is mostly done ...