Basic Information

  • Course Code: EE 605
  • Course Name: Error Correcting Code
  • Course Offered In: 2023-‘24
  • Semester Season: Autumn
  • Instructors: Nikhil Karamchandani
  • Prerequisites: No Strict Prerequisite. Recommended to have a grasp over Probability and Linear Algebra. Good to be comfortable with Groups and Fields.
  • Difficulty (1 being easy and 5 being tough): 5

Course Content

At the beginning, groups and fields are introduced as they are very important part of this topic. Notion of Error Correction and Detection are described. The course goes over Linear Block Codes and their important properties. Some methods to construct Error Correcting Codes are discussed including Hamming, Reed Solomon, Reed Muller, Cyclic and Convolutional. The curriculum also covered topics like MDS codes, expander codes, group testing, matrices that are disjunct and separable, as well as concatenated codes. The Error correcting/detecting capabilities are analyzed. Several Bounds and Asymptotic Bounds on Rate of code are discussed including Gilbert-Varshamov Bound, Plotkin bound, Johnson bound, Elias Bassayligo Bound.

Feedback on Lectures

The lectures were okay at first, but they got harder after the mid-semester. The topics are all connected, so it’s important to understand one before moving on to the next. It is very important to pay full attention to the lecture.

Feedback on Evaluations

There were 4 quiz and best 3 were considered. All the quizes, midsem and endsem were open notes. Only the handwritten notes from class, handwritten solution to homework, prev quizes and midsem were allowed. Those who used i-pads for writing notes were asked to bring printouts.

Study Material and Resources

The class notes are sufficient but here are few books for reference. Contents from many books has been compiled for this course. 1) Introduction to Coding Theory, Roth, Cambridge Univ. Press 2) Error Control Coding, S. Lin and D. J. Costello, Second Edition, Prentice Hall. 3) Theory and Practice of Error Control Codes, Blahut, Addison-Wesley 4) The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes, MacWilliams and Sloane, North-Holland 5) The Theory of Information and Coding, McEliece, Cambridge • NPTEL Course: Error Correcting Codes, P. Vijay Kumar, https://nptel.ac.in/courses/117/108/117108044/ • Video lectures: Error Control Coding, Andrew Thangaraj, http://www.ee.iitm.ac.in/∼andrew/videolectures/EE512 2010/index.html