A Tutorial on Convolutional Coding with Viterbi Decoding by Chip Fleming

A Tutorial on Convolutional Coding with Viterbi Decoding by Chip Fleming of Spectrum Applications Updated 2002-07-05 20:18Z Copyright © 1999-2002, Spectrum Applications. All rights reserved. This tutorial is best viewed with Netscape Navigator, Version 4 or higher. Equations will appear out of line with Internet Explorer. Introduction The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the reader to a forward error correction technique known as convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding. More particularly, this tutorial will focus primarily on the Viterbi decoding algorithm itself. The intended audience is anyone interested in designing or understanding wireless digital communications systems. Following this introduction, I will provide a detailed description of the algorithms for generating random binary data, convolutionally encoding the data, passing the encoded data through a noisy channel, quantizing the received channel symbols, and performing Viterbi decoding on the quantized channel symbols to recover the original binary data. Complete simulation source code examples of these algorithms follow the algorithm descriptions. I have also included some example results from the simulation code. Since the examples are written in the C programming language, your ability to read C code would be very helpful to achieving a clear understanding. However, I have tried to provide enough explanation in the description of the algorithms and comments in the ...