Telecommunications Demystified

Chapter 6

Channel Coding and Decoding

Part 1–Block Coding and Decoding

We’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 6.1you’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 ...