Chapter 8

Reliability
and
Channel Coding

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 The Three Main Sources of Transmission Errors
•  Noise
–  Thermal / white noise
•  Interference
–  electromagnetic radiation emitted from devices such as electric motors
–  background cosmic radiation can cause noise that can disturb radio transmissions and
signals traveling across wires
•  Cosmit radiation consists of energetic charged particles, such as protons and Helium ions, moving
through space
•  When these particles enter the Earth's atmosphere they collide with, and disrupt, atoms in our
atmosphere, producing secondary, less intense, radiation
•  Distortion
–  All physical systems distort signals
–  As a pulse travels along an optical fiber, the pulse disperses
–  Wires have properties of capacitance and inductance
•  that block signals at some frequencies while admitting signals at other frequencies
–  Placing a wire near a large metal object can change the set of frequencies that can
pass through the wire
•  Metal objects can block some frequencies of radio waves, while passing others
•  Attenuation
–  As a signal passes across a medium, the signal becomes weaker
•  signals on wires or optical fibers become weaker over long distances, just as a radio signal
becomes weaker with distance
 Ways to Improve Noise
•  Increase the signal-to-noise ratio (either by increasing the
signal or lowering noise if possible)
–  Physical transmission system is always susceptible to errors
–  It may not be possible to change the signal-to-noise ratio
•  Mechanisms like shielded wiring can help lower noise
•  Increase capacity by reducing BER
–  Reducing noise improves SNR and thus BER
 Types of Error
•  An error occurs when a bit is altered between
transmission and reception
•  Single bit errors
–  only one bit altered Higher data rate
à more errors
–  caused by white noise
•  Burst errors
–  contiguous sequence of B bits in which first last and any
number of intermediate bits in error
–  caused by impulse noise or by fading in wireless
–  effect greater at higher data rates
•  Erasure
•  Sometimes a signal is neither clearly 1 nor clearly 0, but falls in an
ambiguous region, which is known as an erasure

If Data rate is 10 Mbps and the signal is 1usec / 0.1 usec

lost for only 1usec, how many bit errors occur? = 10 bits!
 Types of Error

Bursts of errors due to

impulse noise:
 Effect of Transmission Errors on Data
•  For a burst error, the burst size, or length, is defined as the
number of bits from the start of the corruption to the end of
the corruption

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 Two Strategies for Handling Channel
Errors
•  A variety of mathematical techniques have been developed
that overcome errors during transmission and increase
reliability
–  Known collectively as channel coding
•  The techniques can be divided into two broad categories:
–  Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanisms
–  Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanism
•  In either case we are adding overhead
–  There is always a tradeoff - adding redundancy vs. error detection
•  What is the impact of channel error?
 ARQ Mechanism
•  Not appropriate for wireless applications
–  bit error rate is high causing lots of retransmissions
–  when propagation delay long (satellite) compared with frame
transmission time, resulting in retransmission of frame in error
plus many subsequent frames
 Block and Convolutional Error Codes
•  The two types of FEC techniques satisfy separate needs:
•  Block Error Codes
–  It divides the data to be sent into a set of blocks
–  It attaches extra information known as redundancy to each block
–  The encoding for a given block of bits depends only on the bits
themselves, not on bits that were sent earlier
–  They are memoryless in the sense that the encoding mechanism
does not carry state information from one block of data to the next
•  Convolutional Error Codes
–  It treats data as a series of bits, and computes a code over a
continuous series
–  Thus, the code computed for a set of bits depends on the current
input and some of the previous bits in the stream
–  Convolutional codes are said to be codes with memory

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 Error Correction Motivation
•  Errors can be detected and corrected
–  Error correction is more complex
•  Correction of detected errors usually requires data
block to be retransmitted
•  Instead need to correct errors on basis of bits received
 Error Correction Basic Idea
•  Adds redundancy to transmitted message
•  Can deduce original despite some errors
–  Errors are detected using error-detecting code
–  Error-detecting code added by transmitter
–  Error-detecting code are recalculated and checked by receiver

–  map k bit input onto an n bit codeword

–  each distinctly different
–  When error occurs the receiver tries to guess which codeword
sent was (e.g., teh à the)
 Error Detection

Error Correction with

Row and Column
(RAC) Parity
 Redundancy Check
1- Vertical Redundancy Check (VRC)
- Parity Check
2- Longitudinal Redundancy Check (LRC)
3- Cyclic Redundancy Check
 Error Detection – Parity Check

•  Basic idea
–  Errors are detected using error-detecting code
–  Error-detecting code added by transmitter
–  error-detecting code are recalculated and checked by receiver
•  Parity bit
–  Odd (odd parity)
•  If it had an even number of ones, the parity bit is set to a one, otherwise
it is set to a zero
•  (P=0 if odd ones)à always odd number of ones in the frame
•  Asynchronous applications and Standard in PC memory
–  Even (even parity)
•  Synchronous applications
F(1110001)à
odd parity 1 111 000 1
Parity Bit + Data Block
 Error Detection – Parity Check
An Example Block Error Code:
Single Parity Checking

If even number of 1s à Even parity =0

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 Error Detection Basic Mechanism

•  for block of k bits transmitter

•  Represented by (n,k) encoding scheme
–  k dataword length
–  n codeword
–  r added bits

Example: 8-bit data + single parity

What is the minimum number of bità 2^9 (512) possibilities / only 2^8
bits we should add? (255=256-1) valid code words
(excluding all-zero)
 Redundancy Check
•  Longitudinal Redundancy Check (LRC)
–  Organize data into a table and create a parity for each column

11100111 11011101 00111001 10101001

11100111
11011101
00111001
10101001
10101010

11100111 11011101 00111001 10101001 10101010

Original Data LRC
 Hamming Distance:
A Measure of a Code's Strength
•  No channel coding scheme is ideal!
–  changing enough bits will always transform to a valid codeword
•  What is the minimum number of bits of a valid codeword that
must be changed to produce another valid codeword?
–  To answer the question, engineers use a measure known as the
Hamming distance
–  Given two strings of n bits each, the Hamming distance is defined as
the number of differences

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 Hamming Distance:
A Measure of a Code's Strength
•  Hardware implementation
–  One way to compute the Hamming distance consists of taking the
exclusive or (xor) between two strings
–  Then, counting the number of 1 bits in the answer
•  For example, consider the Hamming distance between
strings 110 and 011
–  The xor of the two strings is:

which contains two 1s

–  Therefore, the Hamming distance between 011 and 101 is 2

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 The Tradeoff Between Error Detection
and Overhead
•  A large value of dmin is desirable
–  because the code is immune to more bit errors, if fewer than dmin bits
are changed, the code can detect that error(s) occurred
•  The maximum number of bit errors that can be detected:

•  A code with a higher value of dmin sends more redundant

information than an error code with a lower value of dmin
•  Code rate that gives the ratio of a dataword size to the
codeword size

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 Error Detection and Correction
•  Relation between Hamming
Distance and Error
–  When a codeword is corrupted
during transmission, the
Hamming distance between the
sent and received codewords is
the number of bits affected by the
error
–  Ex : if the codeword 00000 is sent
and 01101 is received, 3 bits are
in error and the Hamming
distance between the two is d
(00000, 01101) = 3
•  To guarantee the detection of
up to e errors in all cases, the
minimum Hamming distance
in a block code must be
dmin = e + 1 à e= dmin -1
•  To guarantee the maximum t
correctable errors in all cases
⎢ d − 1⎥
t = ⎢ min ⎥
⎣ 2 ⎦
 Cyclic Redundancy Codes (CRC)
•  Term cyclic is derived from a property of the codewords:
–  A circular shift of the bits of any codeword produces another one
•  A (n=7, k=4) CRC by Hamming

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 transmits n bits which is exactly divisible by
CRC generator and checker some number (predetermined divisor)
receiver divides frame by that number

n-k bit
k + (n-k) bits
predetermined n-k+1 bit
divisor

n-k bit

Refer to your notes for examples!

Cyclic Redundancy Codes (CRC)

CRC is the remainder!

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 CRC generator and checker

•  Example : Division in CRC Encoder

predetermined divisor
 CRC generator and checker

•  At the Receiver:
–  Example : Division in CRC Decoder

Known
divisor
 Another CRC Example

Message: 1010001101
Pattern (divisor): 110101

Transmit: 1010001101 + 01110

Step through to calculate the

remainder!
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~pjbk/nets/crc/
 Cyclic Redundancy Codes (CRC)
Mathematical Representation

•  Let M(x) be the message polynomial

•  Let P(x) be the generator polynomial (divisor)
–  P(x) is fixed for a given CRC scheme
–  P(x) is known both by sender and receiver
•  Create a block polynomial F(x) based on M(x) and P(x)
such that F(x) is divisible by P(x)

F ( x) 0
= Q( x) +
P( x) P( x)
 Example of CRC
•  Send •  Receive
–  M(x) = 110011 à x5+x4+x+1 (6 bits)
–  P(x) = 11001 à x4+x3+1 (5 bits, n = 4) 11001 1100111001
à 4 bits of redundancy
11001
–  Form xnM(x) à 110011 0000
à x9+x8+x5+x4 11001
–  Divide xnM(x) by P(x) to find C(x)
11001
100001 00000
11001 1100110000
11001 No remainder
10000 à Accept
11001
1001 à C(x)
F ( x) 0
Send the block 110011 1001 = Q( x) +
P( x) P( x)
 CRC Example
Message: 1010001101
Pattern (divisor): 110101
Transmit: 1010001101 + 01110
1010001101 + 01110
1010001101

n-k bit
k + (n-k) bits

110101 110101 n-k+1 bit

1010001101 + 01110
n-k bit
00000
01110
 Block Code –
Error Detection and Correction
Table1
•  Hamming Distance
–  The Hamming distance between two words is the number of differences
between corresponding bits.
–  Easily found by applying the XOR operation on the two words and count the
number of 1s in the result.
–  Ex : Hamming distance d (000,011) = 2
–  Ex : Hamming distance d (10101, 11110) = 3

•  Minimum Hamming Distance

–  The minimum Hamming distance is the smallest Hamming distance between
all possible pairs in a set of words
–  Ex : Find the minimum Hamming distance of the coding scheme in table 1

Sol: = 2
Block Code –
Error Detection and Correction

•  Minimum Hamming Distance Table2

–  Ex : Find the minimum Hamming distance of the coding scheme in

the table.

–  3 parameters to define the coding scheme

•  Codeword size n
•  Dataword size k
•  The minimum Hamming distance dmin
•  We can call this (Table 2) coding scheme C(5,2) with dmin =3
•  Note : the coding scheme for (Table 1) is C(3,2) with dmin =2
 Error Detection
and Correction
•  Example: Give the above coding scheme we experience 1000 bit
errors when transmitting 1Gigbit bits
–  Calculate the bit error rate.
–  Calculate the code rate.

–  What is the coding scheme: C(n,k),What is dmin?

–  How many errors can be detected using the given encoding technique?
–  How many errors can be corrected using the given encoding technique?
–  Assume the received codeword is 00101. What will be the likely original
dataword?
 Error Detection
and Correction
•  Example: Give the above coding scheme we experience 1000 bit
errors when transmitting 1Gigbit bits BER: 10^-6
–  Calculate the bit error rate.
–  Calculate the code rate. Code rate = k/n = 2/5

–  What is the coding scheme: C(n,k),What is dmin? C(5,2) with dmin =3

–  How many errors can be detected using the given encoding technique?
–  How many errors can be corrected using the given encoding technique?
–  Assume the received codeword is 00101. What will be the likely original
dataword?
e = dmin -1=3-1=2

t= 1
⎢ d − 1⎥
t = ⎢ min ⎥
⎣ 2 ⎦
 Error Detection and Correction
•  The larger the dmin the better
•  The code should be relatively easy to encode/decode
•  We like n-k to be small à reduce bandwidth
•  We like n-k to be large à reduce error rate
•  Assume n=4, k=2 à Code System
rate ½ Performance
•  Given BER, coding can
improve Eb/No
–  Lower Eb/No is required
–  Code gain is the reduction in
dB in Eb/No for a given BER
•  E.g., for BER=10^-6 à
code gain is 2.77 dB
•  Energy per coded bit (Eb) =
½ data bit (Eb)
–  Hence, BER will be 3dB less Channel bit error rate
–  This is because Ebit=2xEdata
•  For very high BER, adding 10^-6
coding requires higher Eb
–  Not due to overhead
 Error Correction with Row and Column
(RAC) Parity
•  Imagine an array of 3-rows and 4-columns, with a parity bit
added for each row and for each column
–  this arrangement is known as a Row and Column (RAC) code
•  Example RAC has n= 20, which means that it is a (20, 12) code
•  Total of 20 bits; 12 data bits

Even Parity (P=0 if even 1s)

In cases where two or three bits are changed

an RAC encoding will be able to detect an odd number of errors

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 Error Correction with Row and Column
(RAC) Parity
•  How error correction works? Assume that one of the bits in
the figure below is changed during transmission:
–  When the receiver arranges the bits into an array and parity bits are
recalculated
•  two of the calculations will disagree with the parity bits received
•  a single bit error will cause two calculated parity bits to disagree with the
parity bit received

RAC can only correct single-bit errors

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