What is "coding theory"

n. (context mathematics English) The branch of mathematics dealing with the art of transmitting messages reliably over a noisy channel by adding redundancy to the message.

Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes and their fitness for a specific application. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error-correction, and more recently also for network coding. Codes are studied by various scientific disciplines—such as information theory, electrical engineering, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science—for the purpose of designing efficient and reliable data transmission methods. This typically involves the removal of redundancy and the correction (or detection) of errors in the transmitted data.

There are four types of coding:

1. Data compression (or, source coding)
2. Error correction (or channel coding)
3. Cryptographic coding
4. Line coding

Data compression and error correction may be studied in combination.

Source encoding attempts to compress the data from a source in order to transmit it more efficiently. This practice is found every day on the Internet where the common Zip data compression is used to reduce the network load and make files smaller.

The second, channel encoding, adds extra data bits to make the transmission of data more robust to disturbances present on the transmission channel. The ordinary user may not be aware of many applications using channel coding. A typical music CD uses the Reed-Solomon code to correct for scratches and dust. In this application the transmission channel is the CD itself. Cell phones also use coding techniques to correct for the fading and noise of high frequency radio transmission. Data modems, telephone transmissions, and NASA all employ channel coding techniques to get the bits through, for example the turbo code and LDPC codes.