Random parity coding (RPC)

Many communication environments are extremely noisy. The noise mechanism may be quite complex such as a nonstationary mix of impulsive processes, Gaussian noise, and frequency selective fading. Such "unfriendly channels" will be become ever more commonplace as communications continues to be impressed into use in challenging environments such as in factories and around other heavy machinery. It is often not possible to use familiar and efficient error control techniques against the high error rates encountered. The good news is that the amount of information that must be conveyed through a very noisy environment is often nominal and the encoding needs to be robust rather than efficient. In many cases, repetition coding is used as a stand-alone encoding or as an inner code. Repetition coding is extremely inefficient and we believe that we can do better. This paper discloses a new very low rate coding method, random parity coding, (RPC), which may be used in the transport of information over very noisy channels. RPC may be used either as a stand-alone encoding scheme or as a method of reducing the error rate so that a powerful and efficient forward error correction code can be used in conjunction with it.