Radio communications: components, systems, and networks [Series Editorial]

Coding has long been fundamental to communication systems, even as far back as the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s: Samuel F. B. Morse created the Morse code as a means of efficiently encoding and transmitting messages in the English language. Channel coding has advanced considerably since the inauguration of information theory by Claude Shannon in 1948, followed by the seminal work by Richard Hamming on practical error correcting codes in 1949. Many crucial algorithms utilized in radio communications today, including convolutional and block codes, the Viterbi algorithm, BCH and Reed- Solomon codes, soft decoding, and so on, date back to the 1960s. Much of the interest in channel coding was driven by space research, to solve the formidable problem of communicating with space probes millions or even billions of kilometers from Earth.