Error correction code


In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, an error correction code, sometimes error correcting code, is used for controlling errors in data over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea is the sender encodes the message with redundant information in the form of an ECC. The redundancy allows the receiver to detect a limited number of errors that may occur anywhere in the message, and often to correct these errors without retransmission. The American mathematician Richard Hamming pioneered this field in the 1940s and invented the first error-correcting code in 1950: the Hamming code.
ECC contrasts with error detection in that errors that are encountered can be corrected, not simply detected. The advantage is that a system using ECC does not require a reverse channel to request retransmission of data when an error occurs. The downside is that there is a fixed overhead that is added to the message, thereby requiring a higher forward channel bandwidth. ECC is therefore applied in situations where retransmissions are costly or impossible, such as one-way communication links and when transmitting to multiple receivers in multicast. Long-latency connections also benefit; in the case of a satellite orbiting around Uranus, retransmission due to errors can create a delay of five hours. ECC information is usually added to mass storage devices to enable recovery of corrupted data, is widely used in modems, and is used on systems where the primary memory is ECC memory.
ECC processing in a receiver may be applied to a digital bitstream or in the demodulation of a digitally modulated carrier. For the latter, ECC is an integral part of the initial analog-to-digital conversion in the receiver. The Viterbi decoder implements a soft-decision algorithm to demodulate digital data from an analog signal corrupted by noise. Many ECC encoders/decoders can also generate a bit-error rate signal which can be used as feedback to fine-tune the analog receiving electronics.
The maximum fractions of errors or of missing bits that can be corrected is determined by the design of the ECC code, so different error correcting codes are suitable for different conditions. In general, a stronger code induces more redundancy that needs to be transmitted using the available bandwidth, which reduces the effective bit-rate while improving the received effective signal-to-noise ratio. The noisy-channel coding theorem of Claude Shannon answers the question of how much bandwidth is left for data communication while using the most efficient code that turns the decoding error probability to zero. This establishes bounds on the theoretical maximum information transfer rate of a channel with some given base noise level. However, the proof is not constructive, and hence gives no insight of how to build a capacity achieving code. After years of research, some advanced ECC systems nowadays come very close to the theoretical maximum.

How it works

ECC is accomplished by adding redundancy to the transmitted information using an algorithm. A redundant bit may be a complex function of many original information bits. The original information may or may not appear literally in the encoded output; codes that include the unmodified input in the output are systematic, while those that do not are non-systematic.
A simplistic example of ECC is to transmit each data bit 3 times, which is known as a repetition code. Through a noisy channel, a receiver might see 8 versions of the output, see table below.
Triplet receivedInterpreted as
0000
0010
0100
1000
1111
1101
1011
0111

This allows an error in any one of the three samples to be corrected by "majority vote" or "democratic voting". The correcting ability of this ECC is:
Though simple to implement and widely used, this triple modular redundancy is a relatively inefficient ECC. Better ECC codes typically examine the last several dozen, or even the last several hundred, previously received bits to determine how to decode the current small handful of bits.

Averaging noise to reduce errors

ECC could be said to work by "averaging noise"; since each data bit affects many transmitted symbols, the corruption of some symbols by noise usually allows the original user data to be extracted from the other, uncorrupted received symbols that also depend on the same user data.
Most telecommunication systems use a fixed channel code designed to tolerate the expected worst-case bit error rate, and then fail to work at all if the bit error rate is ever worse.
However, some systems adapt to the given channel error conditions: some instances of hybrid automatic repeat-request use a fixed ECC method as long as the ECC can handle the error rate, then switch to ARQ when the error rate gets too high;
adaptive modulation and coding uses a variety of ECC rates, adding more error-correction bits per packet when there are higher error rates in the channel, or taking them out when they are not needed.

Types of ECC

The two main categories of ECC codes are block codes and convolutional codes.
There are many types of block codes, Reed-Solomon coding is noteworthy for its widespread use in compact discs, DVDs, and hard disk drives. Other examples of classical block codes include Golay, BCH, Multidimensional parity, and Hamming codes.
Hamming ECC is commonly used to correct NAND flash memory errors.
This provides single-bit error correction and 2-bit error detection.
Hamming codes are only suitable for more reliable single-level cell NAND.
Denser multi-level cell NAND may use multi-bit correcting ECC such as BCH or Reed–Solomon. NOR Flash typically does not use any error correction.
Classical block codes are usually decoded using hard-decision algorithms, which means that for every input and output signal a hard decision is made whether it corresponds to a one or a zero bit. In contrast, convolutional codes are typically decoded using soft-decision algorithms like the Viterbi, MAP or BCJR algorithms, which process analog signals, and which allow for much higher error-correction performance than hard-decision decoding.
Nearly all classical block codes apply the algebraic properties of finite fields. Hence classical block codes are often referred to as algebraic codes.
In contrast to classical block codes that often specify an error-detecting or error-correcting ability, many modern block codes such as LDPC codes lack such guarantees. Instead, modern codes are evaluated in terms of their bit error rates.
Most forward error correction codes correct only bit-flips, but not bit-insertions or bit-deletions.
In this setting, the Hamming distance is the appropriate way to measure the bit error rate.
A few forward error correction codes are designed to correct bit-insertions and bit-deletions, such as Marker Codes and Watermark Codes.
The Levenshtein distance is a more appropriate way to measure the bit error rate when using such codes.

Code-rate and the tradeoff between reliability and data rate

The fundamental principle of ECC is to add redundant bits in order to help the decoder to find out the true message that was encoded by the transmitter. The code-rate of a given ECC system is defined as the ratio between the number of information bits and the total number of bits in a given communication package. The code-rate is hence a real number. A low code-rate close to zero implies a strong code that uses many redundant bits to achieve a good performance, while a large code-rate close to 1 implies a weak code.
The redundant bits that protect the information have to be transferred using the same communication resources that they are trying to protect. This causes a fundamental tradeoff between reliability and data rate. In one extreme, a strong code can induce an important increase in the receiver SNR decreasing the bit error rate, at the cost of reducing the effective data rate. On the other extreme, not using any ECC uses the full channel for information transfer purposes, at the cost of leaving the bits without any additional protection.
One interesting question is the following: how efficient in terms of information transfer can an ECC be that has a negligible decoding error rate? This question was answered by Claude Shannon with his second theorem, which says that the channel capacity is the maximum bit rate achievable by any ECC whose error rate tends to zero: His proof relies on Gaussian random coding, which is not suitable to real-world applications. The upper bound given by Shannon's work inspired a long journey in designing ECCs that can come close to the ultimate performance boundary. Various codes today can attain almost the Shannon limit. However, capacity achieving ECCs are usually extremely complex to implement.
The most popular ECCs have a trade-off between performance and computational complexity. Usually, their parameters give a range of possible code rates, which can be optimized depending on the scenario. Usually, this optimization is done in order to achieve a low decoding error probability while minimizing the impact to the data rate. Another criterion for optimizing the code rate is to balance low error rate and retransmissions number in order to the energy cost of the communication.

Concatenated ECC codes for improved performance

Classical block codes and convolutional codes are frequently combined in concatenated coding schemes in which a short constraint-length Viterbi-decoded convolutional code does most of the work and a block code with larger symbol size and block length "mops up" any errors made by the convolutional decoder. Single pass decoding with this family of error correction codes can yield very low error rates, but for long range transmission conditions iterative decoding is recommended.
Concatenated codes have been standard practice in satellite and deep space communications since Voyager 2 first used the technique in its 1986 encounter with Uranus. The Galileo craft used iterative concatenated codes to compensate for the very high error rate conditions caused by having a failed antenna.

Low-density parity-check (LDPC)

codes are a class of highly efficient linear block
codes made from many single parity check codes. They can provide performance very close to the channel capacity using an iterated soft-decision decoding approach, at linear time complexity in terms of their block length. Practical implementations rely heavily on decoding the constituent SPC codes in parallel.
LDPC codes were first introduced by Robert G. Gallager in his PhD thesis in 1960,
but due to the computational effort in implementing encoder and decoder and the introduction of Reed–Solomon codes,
they were mostly ignored until the 1990s.
LDPC codes are now used in many recent high-speed communication standards, such as DVB-S2, WiMAX, High-Speed Wireless LAN, 10GBase-T Ethernet and G.hn/G.9960. Other LDPC codes are standardized for wireless communication standards within 3GPP MBMS.

Turbo codes

is an iterated soft-decoding scheme that combines two or more relatively simple convolutional codes and an interleaver to produce a block code that can perform to within a fraction of a decibel of the Shannon limit. Predating LDPC codes in terms of practical application, they now provide similar performance.
One of the earliest commercial applications of turbo coding was the CDMA2000 1x digital cellular technology developed by Qualcomm and sold by Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other carriers. It is also used for the evolution of CDMA2000 1x specifically for Internet access, 1xEV-DO. Like 1x, EV-DO was developed by Qualcomm, and is sold by Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other carriers.

Local decoding and testing of codes

Sometimes it is only necessary to decode single bits of the message, or to check whether a given signal is a codeword, and do so without looking at the entire signal. This can make sense in a streaming setting, where codewords are too large to be classically decoded fast enough and where only a few bits of the message are of interest for now. Also such codes have become an important tool in computational complexity theory, e.g., for the design of probabilistically checkable proofs.
Locally decodable codes are error-correcting codes for which single bits of the message can be probabilistically recovered by only looking at a small number of positions of a codeword, even after the codeword has been corrupted at some constant fraction of positions. Locally testable codes are error-correcting codes for which it can be checked probabilistically whether a signal is close to a codeword by only looking at a small number of positions of the signal.

Interleaving

Interleaving is frequently used in digital communication and storage systems to improve the performance of forward error correcting codes. Many communication channels are not memoryless: errors typically occur in bursts rather than independently. If the number of errors within a code word exceeds the error-correcting code's capability, it fails to recover the original code word. Interleaving alleviates this problem by shuffling source symbols across several code words, thereby creating a more uniform distribution of errors. Therefore, interleaving is widely used for burst error-correction.
The analysis of modern iterated codes, like turbo codes and LDPC codes, typically assumes an independent distribution of errors. Systems using LDPC codes therefore typically employ additional interleaving across the symbols within a code word.
For turbo codes, an interleaver is an integral component and its proper design is crucial for good performance. The iterative decoding algorithm works best when there are not short cycles in the factor graph that represents the decoder; the interleaver is chosen to avoid short cycles.
Interleaver designs include:
In multi-carrier communication systems, interleaving across carriers may be employed to provide frequency diversity, e.g., to mitigate frequency-selective fading or narrowband interference.

Example

Transmission without interleaving:
Error-free message:
Transmission with a burst error:
Here, each group of the same letter represents a 4-bit one-bit error-correcting codeword. The codeword is altered in one bit and can be corrected, but the codeword is altered in three bits, so either it cannot be decoded at all or it might be decoded incorrectly.
With interleaving:
Error-free code words:
Interleaved:
Transmission with a burst error:
Received code words after deinterleaving:
In each of the codewords "", "", "", and "", only one bit is altered, so one-bit error-correcting code will decode everything correctly.
Transmission without interleaving:
Original transmitted sentence:
Received sentence with a burst error:
The term "" ends up mostly unintelligible and difficult to correct.
With interleaving:
Transmitted sentence:
Error-free transmission:
Received sentence with a burst error:
Received sentence after deinterleaving:
No word is completely lost and the missing letters can be recovered with minimal guesswork.

Disadvantages of interleaving

Use of interleaving techniques increases total delay. This is because the entire interleaved block must be received before the packets can be decoded. Also interleavers hide the structure of errors; without an interleaver, more advanced decoding algorithms can take advantage of the error structure and achieve more reliable communication than a simpler decoder combined with an interleaver. An example of such an algorithm is based on neural network structures.

Software for error-correcting codes

Simulating the behaviour of error-correcting codes in software is a common practice to design, validate and improve ECCs. The upcoming wireless 5G standard raises a new range of applications for the software ECCs: the Cloud Radio Access Networks in a Software-defined radio context. The idea is to directly use software ECCs in the communications. For instance in the 5G, the software ECCs could be located in the cloud and the antennas connected to this computing resources: improving this way the flexibility of the communication network and eventually increasing the energy efficiency of the system.
In this context, there are various available Open-source software listed below.
DistanceCode
2 Parity
3 Triple modular redundancy
3 perfect Hamming such as Hamming
4 Extended Hamming
5
6
7 perfect binary Golay code
8 extended binary Golay code