Concatenated Error Correction Code - Background

Background

The field of channel coding is concerned with sending a stream of data at the highest possible rate over a given communications channel, and then decoding the original data reliably at the receiver, using encoding and decoding algorithms that are feasible to implement in a given technology.

Shannon's channel coding theorem shows that over many common channels there exist channel coding schemes that are able to transmit data reliably at all rates less than a certain threshold, called the channel capacity of the given channel. In fact, the probability of decoding error can be made to decrease exponentially as the block length of the coding scheme goes to infinity. However, the complexity of a naive optimum decoding scheme that simply computes the likelihood of every possible transmitted codeword increases exponentially with, so such an optimum decoder rapidly becomes infeasible.

In his doctoral thesis, Dave Forney showed that concatenated codes could be used to achieve exponentially decreasing error probabilities at all data rates less than capacity, with decoding complexity that increases only polynomially with the code block length.