EECE 5582 — Making Systems Reliable—An Introduction to Coding Theory
4 semester hoursGraduateLecture
Introduces modern approaches to ensuring reliable network communication, covering theory and use cases. After an accessible, engineering-centric introduction to Galois fields, presents erasure coding and decoding, with applications to protocols that reduce delays over links and networks (network coding) as well as post-quantum security. Considers error correction, starting with an overview of channel capacity and hard detection, as in storage systems. Introduces common codes (BCH, CRCs) with decoding using guessing random additive noise decoding, or GRAND, which can decode any code. Generalizes to using detector-generated information (soft information) and shows how GRAND can be extended to soft information systems, with examples such as CA-Polar and turbo decoding. Considers applications to reliable transport, communication, and storage of data.