Descrição

Information is a much-used word. Information may be stored, retrieved, and conveyed in several ways. With the availability of computers and the possibilities opened by digitalizing, information, in whichever form, may be transformed into digital form and worked upon to provide knowledge.

Information may be encrypted so that only the intended recipients may access it. Both storage and transmission may suffer from losses and errors, so information is often coded to improve retrieval from storage or to correct transmission errors or losses. Information integrity and the technique to achieve it, coding, is the subject of this book. Coding is closely related to cryptography, a subject that will not be covered here.

Teaching in telecommunications tends to concentrate on information transformation into electrical signals and on the propagation of these signals from the transmitter to the receiver. Coding is thus often neglected in telecommunications teaching, even though its importance is paramount.

The purpose of this book is to introduce coding. This is not a mathematics book. It is a book written by an engineer and intended for students of telecommunications engineering. It is based on Mathematica, a computer language very close to mathematics that enables understanding and implementation of coding and decoding with minimum effort. All Mathematica programs and routines are included in the Annex. As the reader probably expects by now, most theorem swill only be stated and not demonstrated.