Repetition Code

In coding theory, the repetition code is one of the most basic error-correcting codes. In order to transmit a message over a noisy channel that may corrupt the transmission in a few places, the idea of the repetition code is to just repeat the message several times. The hope is that the channel corrupts only a minority of these repetitions. This way the receiver will notice that a transmission error occurred since the received data stream is not the repetition of a single message, and moreover, the receiver can recover the original message by looking at the received message in the data stream that occurs most often.

The repetition code is generally a very naive method of encoding data across a channel, and it is not preferred for Additive White Gaussian Noise Channels (AWGN), due to its worse-than-the-present error performance. Repetition codes generally offer a poor compromise between data rate and bit error rate, and other forms of error correcting codes can provide superior performance in these areas. The chief attraction of the repetition code is the ease of implementation.

There are two parts to the repetition code, as for any other code: the encoder and decoder, which will be described in detail.