March 2011
Intermediate
680 pages
25h 12m
English
Chapter 1
Historical Perspective, Motivation and Outline
1.1 A Historical Perspective on Channel Coding
The history of channel coding or Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding dates back to Shannon’s pioneering work [1] in 1948, predicting that arbitrarily reliable communications are achievable with the aid of channel coding, upon adding redundant information to the transmitted messages. However, Shannon refrained from proposing explicit channel coding schemes for practical implementations. Furthermore, although the amount of redundancy added increases as the associated information delay increases, he did not specify the maximum delay that may have to be tolerated in order to be able to communicate near the Shannonian limit. In recent years researchers have been endeavouring to reduce the amount of latency inflicted, for example, by a turbo codec’s interleaver that has to be tolerated for the purpose of attaining a given target performance.
Historically, one of the first practical FEC codes was the single error correcting Hamming code [2], which was a block code proposed in 1950. Convolutional FEC codes date back to 1955 [3], which were discovered by Elias, while Wozencraft and Reiffen [4,05], as well as Fano [6] and Massey [7], proposed various algorithms for their decoding. A major milestone in the history of convolutional error correction coding was the invention of a maximum likelihood sequence estimation algorithm by Viterbi [8] in 1967. A classic interpretation of the Viterbi ...
