ABSTRACT
Error control coding is a branch of communication engineering that addresses the problem of how to make digital transmission more reliable—how to recover uncorrupted data at the receiver even in the presence of significant corruption of the transmitted signal. Error control codes make digital transmission more reliable by the careful introduction of redundancy into the transmitted signal. Data generated by the source is first compressed by a source encoder—tasked with removing redundancy to produce an efficient binary representation of the data—and then passed through the error control encoder, which adds redundancy to enable robust recovery by the error control decoder at the receiver. The chapter discusses a multitude of error control techniques that have been implemented in mobile communication systems. While there are many different approaches, all error control schemes have this in common: They add structure to the transmitted signal in a way that limits what can be transmitted, compared with uncoded transmission.
