Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Example of Convo Code
Example of Convo Code
Convolutional Codes ∗
Behnaam Aazhang
This work is produced by The Connexions Project and licensed under the
†
Creative Commons Attribution License
Abstract
A description of channel coding using convolutional codes.
Convolutional codes are one type of code used for channel coding . Another type of code used is block
1
coding .
2
1 Convolutional codes
In convolutional codes, each block of k bits is mapped into a block of n bits but these n bits are not only
determined by the present k information bits but also by the previous information bits. This dependence
can be captured by a nite state machine.
Example 1
A rate 21 convolutional coder k = 1, n = 2 with memory length 2 and constraint length 3.
Figure 1
Since the length of the shift register is 2, there are 4 dierent rates. The behavior of the
convolutional coder can be captured by a 4 state machine. States: 00, 01, 10, 11,
∗ Version 2.7: May 17, 2004 11:43 am GMT-5
† http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0
1 "Channel Coding" <http://cnx.org/content/m10174/latest/>
2 "Channel Coding": Section Block codes <http://cnx.org/content/m10174/latest/#s1>
http://cnx.org/content/m10181/2.7/
Connexions module: m10181 2
For example, arrival of information bit 0 transitions from state 10 to state 01.
The encoding and the decoding process can be realized in trellis structure.
Figure 2
Figure 3
http://cnx.org/content/m10181/2.7/
Connexions module: m10181 3
Starting from state 00 the Hamming distance between the possible paths and the received
sequence is measured. At the end, the path with minimum distance to the received sequence is
chosen as the correct trellis path. The information sequence will then be determined.
Convolutional coding lends itself to very ecient trellis based encoding and decoding. They are very
practical and powerful codes.
http://cnx.org/content/m10181/2.7/