University of Kufa

Channel Coding
and Decoding

PRESENTED BY
Haider Hasan

Department of Electronics and Communications

Contents
• What’s Channel Coding & Decoding?

• Categories of FEC (Forward Error Correction) Codes

• Categories of Channel Decoders

• Applications

• Limitations
What’s Channel Coding & Decoding?
Definition
It’s a process used in modern communication systems to ensure that the data received
is the same as the data sent. Channel Coding can be achieved by adding additional
information to the data before transmission (redundancy). This redundant information
helps to overcome errors at the receiver end caused during transmission of information.
The channel decoder uses sophisticated algorithms to interpret the additional
information to recover the original data.

𝑋
𝑛 ^
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Channel Channel
Channel
Coder Decoder

Noise
What’s Channel Coding & Decoding?
Definition
Input Output
Signal Signal
What’s Channel Coding & Decoding?
Why is it an Important process
It’s a crucial process in communication systems
for several reasons:

• Error Detection and Correction

• Enhanced Reliability of Data Transmission

• Improved Data Integrity

• Robustness in Noisy Environments

• Reduced BER (Bit Error Rate)

Categories of FEC
The key idea of Forward Error Correction is to transmit enough redundant data to
allow the receiver to recover the original data from errors by itself, with no reverse
channel to request retransmission needed. Main categories of FEC:

FEC Codes

Convolutional
Block Codes Cyclic Codes Turbo Codes
Codes
Categories of FEC
Block Codes
The channel encoder that implements this methodology receives the data in k-bit
blocks and divide it into blocks to create an (n, k) block code, and it adds (n-k)
redundant bits, resulting in an encoded block of n-bits.

Channel
Encoder

k-bits n-bits

Information Codewords
Categories of FEC
Cyclic Codes
They are a subclass of block codes. Cyclic coders shift the bits of the codeword to
result in another valid codeword. It has 2 important properties:

• Linearity: , where are codewords

• Cyclic Shifting:
Categories of FEC
Convolutional Codes
Encoding in this type is of information stream rather than information blocks with
considering some information of the previous stream. Thus, this type of codes need
memory.
Categories of FEC
Turbo Codes
This type is a high performance class of FEC. Turbo codes were the first practical
codes to closely approach the maximum channel capacity (Shannon Limit), which is
the channel capacity of a continuous channel with bandwidth .
Categories of Channel Decoders
The channel decoder takes the transmitted encoded data and convert it back into its
original form, it allows the receiver to detect and correct errors. The categories of
channel decoders are:

Channel
Decoders

Maximum
Hard Decision Soft Decision Iterative
Likelihood
Decoders Decoders Decoders
Decoders
Applications
Due to the importance of channel coding & decoding, it takes an important
role in many applications, some of them are:

• Wireless Communication Systems

• Cellular Mobile Systems

• IoT

• Deep-Space Communication

• Autoencoders (specific tool in ML & DL)

Limitations
Even though channel coding & decoding is an important process and has
many applications, it still faces limitations such as:

• Complexity of encoding & decoding: channel coding and decoding can

have high complexity which will lead to increased computational
requirements and power consumption

• Latency: Latency is a challenge for real-time applications, especially the

ones that require high speeds.

• Error Floor: means that at a certain point, increasing the SNR wouldn’t
lead to decreasing the BER, which limits the performance of the
communication system
Conclusion
Channel Coding and Decoding play a crucial role in digital communication system,
they enhance the reliability of data transmission by adding redundancy to the
transmitted data allowing the receiver to detect and correct errors caused by the noise
introduced during transmission. However, they face some limitations as covered
previously which limits the benefits of the process.

As technology continues to advance, we expect new developments in the field and

improvements to eliminate the limitations and implement in more applications
References
• Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems 5th Edition. B. P. Lathi, Zhi Ding

• What is Channel Coding? | AccelerComm

• Source Coding and Channel Coding (electronicsandcommunications.com)

• Information Theory. Mohamed Hamada. The University of Aizu

• An Introduction to Channel Coding and Decoding over BSC

• Channel Coding. Nada Nasih

• Source–Channel Coding for Wireless Networks. Niklas Wenerson. KTH Electrical Engineering

• The Basics of Channel Coding | AccelerComm

Thanks For Listening 

Any Questions?