Error Correction Coding, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18Some Applications of Error Correction in Modern Communication Systems

18.1 Introduction

Error‐correction coding is ubiquitously used in modern communication systems. This chapter highlights how a few technological systems use error‐correction coding to give a sense of the practical scale of “real” codes and how different methods of error‐correction coding are combined together to make real systems.

The variety of systems that could be explored here is enormous. For example, quick response (QR) codes employ Reed–Solomon codes. Depending on the manufacturer, flash memories employ different codes, such as LDPC, Reed–Solomon, or BCH. But the systems that are described here in some detail are related to broad‐based communications technologies.

18.2 Digital Video Broadcast T2 (DVB‐T2)

The DVB‐T2 standard describes channel coding and modulation for digital terrestrial TV. As a full‐fledged communication system, it makes use of topics introduced in this book in several ways, including scrambling, CRC codes, and error correction [105]. Of the many system components involved in this standard, we discuss here only the forward error‐correction components. This consists of concatenated coding, with a BCH as the outer code and an LDPC code as the inner code. (This is one of the changes between the DVB‐T2 standard compared to the earlier DVB standard, which uses Reed–Solomon codes as the outer code and a convolutional code as the inner code, with convolutional interleaving [