It has long been recognized that there are fascinating connections between cod ing theory, cryptology, and combinatorics. Therefore it seemed desirable to us to organize a conference that brings together experts from these three areas for a fruitful exchange of ideas. We decided on a venue in the Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain) region, one of the most scenic areas of China, so as to provide the additional inducement of an attractive location. The conference was planned for June 2003 with the official title Workshop on Coding, Cryptography and Combi natorics (CCC 2003). Those who are familiar with events in East Asia in the first half of 2003 can guess what happened in the end, namely the conference had to be cancelled in the interest of the health of the participants. The SARS epidemic posed too serious a threat. At the time of the cancellation, the organization of the conference was at an advanced stage: all invited speakers had been selected and all abstracts of contributed talks had been screened by the program committee. Thus, it was de cided to call on all invited speakers and presenters of accepted contributed talks to submit their manuscripts for publication in the present volume. Altogether, 39 submissions were received and subjected to another round of refereeing. After care ful scrutiny, 28 papers were accepted for publication.

Channel coding lies at the heart of digital communication and data storage, and this detailed introduction describes the core theory as well as decoding algorithms, implementation details, and performance analyses. In this book, Professors Ryan and Lin provide clear information on modern channel codes, including turbo and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. They also present detailed coverage of BCH codes, Reed-Solomon codes, convolutional codes, finite geometry codes, and product codes, providing a one-stop resource for both classical and modern coding techniques. Assuming no prior knowledge in the field of channel coding, the opening chapters begin with basic theory to introduce newcomers to the subject. Later chapters then extend to advanced topics such as code ensemble performance analyses and algebraic code design. 250 varied and stimulating end-of-chapter problems are also included to test and enhance learning, making this an essential resource for students and practitioners alike.

The last few years have witnessed rapid advancements in information and coding theory research and applications. This book provides a comprehensive guide to selected topics, both ongoing and emerging, in information and coding theory. Consisting of contributions from well-known and high-profile researchers in their respective specialties, topics that are covered include source coding; channel capacity; linear complexity; code construction, existence and analysis; bounds on codes and designs; space-time coding; LDPC codes; and codes and cryptography.All of the chapters are integrated in a manner that renders the book as a supplementary reference volume or textbook for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses on information and coding theory. As such, it will be a valuable text for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels as well as instructors, researchers, engineers, and practitioners in these fields.Supporting Powerpoint Slides are available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text.

In this thesis, we extend applications of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes to a combination of constituent sub-channels, which is a mixture of Gaussian channels with erasures. This model, for example, represents a common channel in magnetic recordings where thermal asperities in the system are detected and represented at the decoder as erasures. Although this channel is practically useful, we cannot find any previous work that evaluates performance of LDPC codes over this channel. We are also interested in practical issues such as designing robust LDPC codes for the mixture channel and predicting performance variations due to erasure patterns (random and burst), and finite block lengths. On time varying channels, a common error control strategy is to adapt the coding rate according to available channel state information (CSI). An effective way to realize this coding strategy is to use a single code and puncture it in a rate-compatible fashion, a so-called rate-compatible punctured code (RCPC). We are interested in the existence of good puncturing patterns for rate-changes that minimize performance loss. We show the existence of good puncturing patterns with analysis and verify the results with simulations. Universality of a channel code across a broad range of coding rates is a theoretically interesting topic. We are interested in the possibility of using the puncturing technique proposed in this thesis for designing universal LDPC codes. We also consider how to design high rate LDPC codes by puncturing low rate LDPC codes. The new design method can take advantage of longer effect block lengths, sparser parity-check matrices, and larger minimum distances of low rate LDPC codes.