Understanding Error Control Coding

This book is addressed to newcomers to error control coding (ECC), making the subject easy to understand and to apply in a variety of cases. The book begins by presenting in a detailed, step-by-step manner the plethora of parts an ECC system has and the way they interact to achieve the performance required. Contrary to the more abstract and formal approach followed in most books on this topic, this book is unique in that all of the concepts, methods, techniques and algorithms are introduced by way of examples. Thus, the book is almost a workbook, and therefore very suitable for self-study. Readers are encouraged to take an active role while reading, performing calculations as chapters' progress. Moreover, to reinforce the learning process, many of the topics introduced in the book (Galois fields, Extended Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, interleaving, erasure correction, etc.) are presented in various parts of the book in different ways or contexts.

• Offers a practical guide to error control coding, accessible to readers with varying backgrounds;
• Provides newcomers with a sound foundation in error control coding, using a select few topics considered by the author fundamental from an engineering point of view;
• Presents material with minimal mathematics;
• Motivates carefully concepts, methods and algorithms making clear the idea behind the conditions for the code to work.

After obtaining a Master's Degree from New York University in 1971 and a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1974, both in Electrical Engineering, Emilio Sanvicente was appointed as an assistant professor at the School of Telecommunication Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain). Ensuing a period of ten years of "toil and sweat", he became a full professor in 1984 and remained there until his retirement in 2011. During those years, he taught courses in a variety of subjects, from The Mathematics of Electrical Engineering, to Communication Networks, Information Theory and Coding, Digital Transmission and Cryptography. He also conducted research in those areas and carried out more than twenty projects for both private and government institutions.