Energy Efficient Error-Correcting Coding for Wireless Systems

The wireless channel is a hostile environment. The transmitted signal does not only suffers multi-path fading but also noise and interference from other users of the wireless channel. That causes unreliable communications. To achieve high-quality communications, error correcting coding is required to mitigate the noise and interference encountered during the signal transmission. However, the current design of error correcting codes does not take the power consumption in ADCs into account. ADCs consume about 50\% of the total base-band power. The power-efficiency of ADCs does not increase in the same speed as the baseband signal processing. Digital signal processing follows Moore's law. Given the same specification, the power consumed in ADCs halves every 2.7 years but the power consumption in the baseband signal processing decreases a factor of 10 every 5 years. In the case of RF signal processing, the power efficiency is limited by the semi-conductor technology. Therefore, ADCs are the main bottleneck for an energy-efficient wireless receiver. Quantized channels arise in ..