COMMUNICATING
EFFICIENTLY
Examples of channels
Data are sent from one place to another, but they
may be corrupted along the way. Every time
information is transmitted on my channel, it may
get corrupted by noise.
Telepone lines, Internet cables, fiber-optic lines,
and the atmosphere.
Error Detection and Correction
One of the tasks in coding theory is to detect, or
even correct, errors.
Error detection is a great aid in high-quality
maintenance. Without error detection, a large
digital system becomes unmaintainable.
The goal of coding theory is to improve the
reliability of digital communication by devising
methods that enable the receiver to decide
whether there have been errors during the
transmission (error detection), and if there are, to
possibly recover the original message ( error
correction)
Suppose the message “stop” (encoded as 00) is
transmitted over a noisy channel. The message may
become corrupted and maybe received as 01.
The receiver may not realize that the message has been corrupted
and proceeds to execute the command “play” rather than “stop”.
Hence, this communication fails.
The next step is the error control coding, also called channel coding.
The idea of channel coding is to encode the message again after the
source coding while introducing some form of redundancy so that
errors can be detected or even corrected. The output is called a
codeword. Below is a new communication model.
Claude Shannon is credited for the
idea of using redundancy to add
reliability to information. It is not a
trivial idea, since people are
conditioned against it. Most of the
time, redundancy is eliminated in
computer data to save space. In fact,
data compression methods do just
that.
Richard Hamming was one of the first to actually
construct and implement error-correcting codes.
He did this out of frustration with Bell Lab’s
mechanical relay computer’s inability to deal
with errors.
He said, “Damn it, if the machine can detect an
error, why can’t it locate the position and correct
it?” His research included work in the areas of
coding theory, numerical methods, statistics, and
digital filtering.
Parity Check
The simplest form of error detection is parity, in
which a single bit is appended to a bit string. A
bit string has odd parity if the number of 1s in
the string is odd. A bit string has even parity if
the number of 1s in the string is even. Even
parity is more common, but both are used.
Repetition
The simplest possible error-correcting code is the
repetition code. For instance, if the message
PROCEED will be sent, each letter will be repeated
a certain number of times and be sent as, say,
PPPPRRRRROOOOOCCCCCEEEEEEEEEDDDDD.
Even if a number of these letters got garbled in transmission,
the original message can be recovered from any received
message by a process called majority decoding.
In this case, majority decoding means that for each block of
5 letters, the original letter is the one which appears most
frequently in the block.
EXAMPLES
EXAMPLES
HAMMING DISTANCE
Suppose you received the word SHOP. If there are
errors in the transmission, it will be very difficult to
determine what word was originally transmitted. It
could have been SHIP, SHOT, SKIP, STRAP, etc. Actually,
words are, in a sense, “too close” to each other. What
gives a code its error-correcting capability is the fact
that the codewords are “far apart”. This distance
concept will be made more precise in the succeeding
discussions.
The Hamming Distance d(x,y) between the bit strings x
and y is the number of positions in which these strings
differ.
Note that the Hamming distance between two bit
strings equals the number of changes in individual bits
needed to transform one of the strings into the other.
EXAMPLES
Compression and Decompression
Compression is the process of reducing the size of
an electronic file for storage or transmission. One
compressed, the file takes up less space,
downloads or uploads faster, and, in many cases,
can be executed or read in less time.
Decomposition is the reverse process which
restores the file to its original size.
Data compression is referred to as
source coding (coding done at the
source of the data before it is stored or
transmitted). It involves encoding
information using fewer bits than the
original representation. It can either be
lossless or lossy.
Members
• ALEX PUBLICO Jr.
• WENDY DANAO
• MARUELA ALFREDO
• ERIC PASCUA
