The Block Code and Its Parameters
Error-correcting codes are used to reliably transmit digital data over unreliable communication channels subject to channel noise. When a sender wants to transmit a possibly very long data stream using a block code, the sender breaks the stream up into pieces of some fixed size. Each such piece is called message and the procedure given by the block code encodes each message individually into a codeword, also called a block in the context of block codes. The sender then transmits all blocks to the receiver, who can in turn use some decoding mechanism to (hopefully) recover the original messages from the possibly corrupted received blocks. The performance and success of the overall transmission depends on the parameters of the channel and the block code.
Formally, a block code is an injective mapping
- .
Here, is a finite and nonempty set and and are integers. The meaning and significance of these three parameters and other parameters related to the code are described below.
Read more about this topic: Block Code
Famous quotes containing the words block, code and/or parameters:
“For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles...”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 1:22-3.
“Many people will say to working mothers, in effect, “I don’t think you can have it all.” The phrase for “have it all” is code for “have your cake and eat it too.” What these people really mean is that achievement in the workplace has always come at a price—usually a significant personal price; conversely, women who stayed home with their children were seen as having sacrificed a great deal of their own ambition for their families.”
—Anne C. Weisberg (20th century)
“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”
—J.G. (James Graham)