MIT 6.

02 DRAFT Lecture Notes

Fall 2011 (Last update: October 2, 2011)
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C HAPTER 7
Convolutional Codes: Construction
and Encoding

This chapter introduces a widely used class of codes, called convolutional codes, which
are used in a variety of systems including today’s popular wireless standards (such as
802.11) and in satellite communications. They are also used as a building block in more
powerful modern codes, such as turbo codes, which are used in wide-area cellular wireless
network standards such as 3G, LTE, and 4G. Convolutional codes are beautiful because
they are intuitive, one can understand them in many different ways, and there is a way
to decode them so as to recover the most likely message from among the set of all possible
transmitted messages. This chapter discusses the encoding of convolutional codes; the
next one discusses how to decode convolutional codes efficiently.
Like the block codes discussed in the previous chapter, convolutional codes involve
the computation of parity bits from message bits and their transmission, and they are also
linear codes. Unlike block codes in systematic form, however, the sender does not send the
message bits followed by (or interspersed with) the parity bits; in a convolutional code, the
sender sends only the parity bits. These codes were invented by Peter Elias ’44, an MIT EECS
faculty member, in the mid-1950s. For several years, it was not known just how powerful
these codes are and how best to decode them. The answers to these questions started
emerging in the 1960s, with the work of people like Andrew Viterbi ’57, G. David Forney
(SM ’65, Sc.D. ’67, and MIT EECS faculty member), Jim Omura SB ’63, and many others.

 7.1 Convolutional Code Construction

The encoder uses a sliding window to calculate r > 1 parity bits by combining various sub-
sets of bits in the window. The combining is a simple addition in F2 , as in the previous
chapter (i.e., modulo 2 addition, or equivalently, an exclusive-or operation). Unlike a block
code, however, the windows overlap and slide by 1, as shown in Figure 7-1. The size of the
window, in bits, is called the code’s constraint length. The longer the constraint length,
the larger the number of parity bits that are influenced by any given message bit. Because
the parity bits are the only bits sent over the channel, a larger constraint length generally

1
2 CHAPTER 7. CONVOLUTIONAL CODES: CONSTRUCTION AND ENCODING

Figure 7-1: An example of a convolutional code with two parity bits per message bit and a constraint length
(shown in the rectangular window) of three. I.e., r = 2, K = 3.

implies a greater resilience to bit errors. The trade-off, though, is that it will take consider-
ably longer to decode codes of long constraint length (we will see in the next chapter that
the complexity of decoding is exponential in the constraint length), so one cannot increase
the constraint length arbitrarily and expect fast decoding.
If a convolutional code produces r parity bits per window and slides the window for-
ward by one bit at a time, its rate (when calculated over long messages) is 1/r. The greater
the value of r, the higher the resilience of bit errors, but the trade-off is that a proportionally
higher amount of communication bandwidth is devoted to coding overhead. In practice,
we would like to pick r and the constraint length to be as small as possible while providing
a low enough resulting probability of a bit error.
In 6.02, we will use K (upper case) to refer to the constraint length, a somewhat unfortu-
nate choice because we have used k (lower case) in previous lectures to refer to the number
of message bits that get encoded to produce coded bits. Although “L” might be a better
way to refer to the constraint length, we’ll use K because many papers and documents in
the field use K (in fact, many papers use k in lower case, which is especially confusing).
Because we will rarely refer to a “block” of size k while talking about convolutional codes,
we hope that this notation won’t cause confusion.
Armed with this notation, we can describe the encoding process succinctly. The encoder
looks at K bits at a time and produces r parity bits according to carefully chosen functions
that operate over various subsets of the K bits.1 One example is shown in Figure 7-1, which
shows a scheme with K = 3 and r = 2 (the rate of this code, 1/r = 1/2). The encoder spits
out r bits, which are sent sequentially, slides the window by 1 to the right, and then repeats
the process. That’s essentially it.
At the transmitter, the two princial remaining details that we must describe are:
1. What are good parity functions and how can we represent them conveniently?
2. How can we implement the encoder efficiently?
The rest of this lecture will discuss these issues, and also explain why these codes are
called “convolutional”.

1
By convention, we will assume that each message has K − 1 “0” bits padded in front, so that the initial
conditions work out properly.
SECTION 7.2. PARITY EQUATIONS 3

 7.2 Parity Equations

The example in Figure 7-1 shows one example of a set of parity equations, which govern
the way in which parity bits are produced from the sequence of message bits, X. In this
example, the equations are as follows (all additions are in F2 )):

p0 [n] = x[n] + x[n − 1] + x[n − 2]

p1 [n] = x[n] + x[n − 1] (7.1)

The rate of this code is 1/2.

An example of parity equations for a rate 1/3 code is

p0 [n] = x[n] + x[n − 1] + x[n − 2]

p1 [n] = x[n] + x[n − 1]
p2 [n] = x[n] + x[n − 2] (7.2)

In general, one can view each parity equation as being produced by combining the mes-
sage bits, X, and a generator polynomial, g. In the first example above, the generator poly-
nomial coefficients are (1, 1, 1) and (1, 1, 0), while in the second, they are (1, 1, 1), (1, 1, 0),
and (1, 0, 1).
We denote by gi the K-element generator polynomial for parity bit pi . We can then write
pi [n] as follows:
k−1
pi [n] = ( ∑ gi [ j]x[n − j]) mod 2. (7.3)
j=0

The form of the above equation is a convolution of g and x—hence the term “convolu-
tional code”. The number of generator polynomials is equal to the number of generated
parity bits, r, in each sliding window. The rate of the code is 1/r if the encoder slides the
window one bit at a time.

 7.2.1 An Example
Let’s consider the two generator polynomials of Equations 7.1 (Figure 7-1). Here, the gen-
erator polynomials are

g0 = 1, 1, 1
g1 = 1, 1, 0 (7.4)

If the message sequence, X = [1, 0, 1, 1, . . .] (as usual, x[n] = 0 ∀n < 0), then the parity
4 CHAPTER 7. CONVOLUTIONAL CODES: CONSTRUCTION AND ENCODING

bits from Equations 7.1 work out to be

p0 [0] = (1 + 0 + 0) = 1
p1 [0] = (1 + 0) = 1
p0 [1] = (0 + 1 + 0) = 1
p1 [1] = (0 + 1) = 1
p0 [2] = (1 + 0 + 1) = 0
p1 [2] = (1 + 0) = 1
p0 [3] = (1 + 1 + 0) = 0
p1 [3] = (1 + 1) = 0. (7.5)

Therefore, the bits transmitted over the channel are [1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, . . .].
There are several generator polynomials, but understanding how to construct good
ones is outside the scope of 6.02. Some examples (found by J. Busgang) are shown in
Table 7-1.

Constraint length g0 g1
3 110 111
4 1101 1110
5 11010 11101
6 110101 111011
7 110101 110101
8 110111 1110011
9 110111 111001101
10 110111001 1110011001

Table 7-1: Examples of generator polynomials for rate 1/2 convolutional codes with different constraint
lengths.

 7.3 Two Views of the Convolutional Encoder

We now describe two views of the convolutional encoder, which we will find useful in
better understanding convolutional codes and in implementing the encoding and decod-
ing procedures. The first view is in terms of shift registers, where one can construct the
mechanism using shift registers that are connected together. This view is useful in devel-
oping hardware encoders. The second is in terms of a state machine, which corresponds
to a view of the encoder as a set of states with well-defined transitions between them. The
state machine view will turn out to be extremely useful in figuring out how to decode a set
of parity bits to reconstruct the original message bits.

 7.3.1 Shift-Register View

Figure 7-2 shows the same encoder as Figure 7-1 and Equations (7.1) in the form of a block
diagram made up of shift registers. The x[n − i] values (here there are two) are referred to
SECTION 7.3. TWO VIEWS OF THE CONVOLUTIONAL ENCODER 5

Figure 7-2: Block diagram view of convolutional coding with shift registers.

Figure 7-3: State-machine view of convolutional coding.

as the state of the encoder. This block diagram takes message bits in one bit at a time, and
spits out parity bits (two per input bit, in this case).
Input message bits, x[n], arrive from the left. (These bits arrive after being processed
by the receiver’s sampling and demapping procedures). The block diagram calculates the
parity bits using the incoming bits and the state of the encoder (the k − 1 previous bits;
two in this example). After the r parity bits are produced, the state of the encoder shifts
by 1, with x[n] taking the place of x[n − 1], x[n − 1] taking the place of x[n − 2], and so on,
with x[n − K + 1] being discarded. This block diagram is directly amenable to a hardware
implementation using shift registers.

 7.3.2 State-Machine View

Another useful view of convolutional codes is as a state machine, which is shown in Fig-
ure 7-3 for the same example that we have used throughout this chapter (Figure 7-1).
6 CHAPTER 7. CONVOLUTIONAL CODES: CONSTRUCTION AND ENCODING

An important point to note: the state machine for a convolutional code is identical for
all codes with a given constraint length, K, and the number of states is always 2K−1 . Only
the pi labels change depending on the number of generator polynomials and the values of
their coefficients. Each state is labeled with x[n − 1]x[n − 2] . . . x[n − K + 1]. Each arc is
labeled with x[n]/p0 p1 . . .. In this example, if the message is 101100, the transmitted bits
are 11 11 01 00 01 10.
This state-machine view is an elegant way to explain what the transmitter does, and also
what the receiver ought to do to decode the message, as we now explain. The transmitter
begins in the initial state (labeled “STARTING STATE” in Figure 7-3) and processes the
message one bit at a time. For each message bit, it makes the state transition from the
current state to the new one depending on the value of the input bit, and sends the parity
bits that are on the corresponding arc.
The receiver, of course, does not have direct knowledge of the transmitter’s state tran-
sitions. It only sees the received sequence of parity bits, with possible bit errors. Its task is
to determine the best possible sequence of transmitter states that could have produced
the parity bit sequence. This task is called decoding, which we introduce next, and study
in more detail in the next chapter.

 7.4 The Decoding Problem

As mentioned above, the receiver should determine the “best possible” sequence of trans-
mitter states. There are many ways of defining “best”, but one that is especially appealing
is the most likely sequence of states (i.e., message bits) that must have been traversed (sent)
by the transmitter. A decoder that is able to infer the most likely sequence is also called a
maximum-likelihood decoder.
Consider the binary symmetric channel, where bits are received erroneously with prob-
ability pe < 1/2. What should a maximum-likelihood decoder do when it receives r? We
show now that if it decodes r as c, the nearest valid codeword with smallest Hamming
distance from r, then the decoding is a maximum-likelihood one.
A maximum-likelihood decoder maximizes the quantity P(r|c); i.e., it finds c so that the
probability that r was received given that c was sent is maximized. Consider any codeword
c̃. If r and c̃ differ in d bits (i.e., their Hamming distance is d), then P(r|c) = pde (1 − pe ) N−d ,
where N is the length of the received word (and also the length of each valid codeword).
It’s more convenient to take the logarithm of this conditional probaility, also termed the
log-likelihood:2
pe
log P(r|c̃) = d log pe + (N − d) log(1 − pe ) = d log + N log(1 − pe ). (7.6)
1 − pe
p
If pe < 1/2, which is the practical realm of operation, then 1−epe < 1 and the log term
is negative (otherwise, it’s non-negative). As a result, minimizing the log likelihood boils
down to minimizing d, because the second term on the RHS of Eq. (7.6) is a constant.
A simple numerical example may be useful. Suppose that bit errors are independent
and identically distribute with a BER of 0.001, and that the receiver digitizes a sequence
2
The base of the logarithm doesn’t matter to us at this stage, but traditionally the log likelihood is defined
as the natural logarithm (base e).
SECTION 7.4. THE DECODING PROBLEM 7

Msg Xmit* Rcvd d

0000 000000000000 7
0001 000000111110 8
0010 000011111000 8
0011 000011010110 4
0100 001111100000 6
0101 001111011110 5
0110 001101001000 7
0111 001100100110 6
111011000110
1000 111110000000 4
1001 111110111110 5
1010 111101111000 7
1011 111101000110 2 Most likely: 1011
1100 110001100000 5
1101 110001011110 4
1110 110010011000 6
1111 110010100110 3

Figure 7-4: When the probability of bit error is less than 1/2, maximum-likelihood decoding boils down
to finding the message whose parity bit sequence, when transmitted, has the smallest Hamming distance
to the received sequence. Ties may be broken arbitrarily. Unfortunately, for an N-bit transmit sequence,
there are 2N possibilities, which makes it hugely intractable to simply go through in sequence because
of the sheer number. For instance, when N = 256 bits (a really small packet), the number of possibilities
rivals the number of atoms in the universe!

of analog samples into the bits 1101001. Is the sender more likely to have sent 1100111
or 1100001? The first has a Hamming distance of 3, and the probability of receiving that
sequence is (0.999)4 (0.001)3 = 9.9 × 10−10 . The second choice has a Hamming distance of
1 and a probability of (0.999)6 (0.001)1 = 9.9 × 10−4 , which is six orders of magnitude higher
and is overwhelmingly more likely.
Thus, the most likely sequence of parity bits that was transmitted must be the one with
the smallest Hamming distance from the sequence of parity bits received. Given a choice
of possible transmitted messages, the decoder should pick the one with the smallest such
Hamming distance.
Determining the nearest valid codeword to a received word is easier said than done for
convolutional codes. For example, see Figure 7-4, which shows a convolutional code with
K = 3 and rate 1/2. If the receiver gets 111011000110, then some errors have occurred,
because no valid transmitted sequence matches the received one. The last column in the
example shows d, the Hamming distance to all the possible transmitted sequences, with
8 CHAPTER 7. CONVOLUTIONAL CODES: CONSTRUCTION AND ENCODING

Figure 7-5: The trellis is a convenient way of viewing the decoding task and understanding the time evo-
lution of the state machine.

the smallest one circled. To determine the most-likely 4-bit message that led to the parity
sequence received, the receiver could look for the message whose transmitted parity bits
have smallest Hamming distance from the received bits. (If there are ties for the smallest,
we can break them arbitrarily, because all these possibilities have the same resulting post-
coded BER.)
The straightforward approach of simply going through the list of possible transmit se-
quences and comparing Hamming distances is horribly intractable. The reason is that a
transmit sequence of N bits has 2 N possible strings, a number that is simply too large for
even small values of N, like 256 bits. We need a better plan for the receiver to navigate this
unbelievable large space of possibilities and quickly determine the valid message with
smallest Hamming distance. We will study a powerful and widely applicable method for
solving this problem, called Viterbi decoding, in the next lecture. This decoding method
uses a special structure called the trellis, which we describe next.

 7.5 The Trellis

The trellis is a structure derived from the state machine that will allow us to develop an
efficient way to decode convolutional codes. The state machine view shows what happens
at each instant when the sender has a message bit to process, but doesn’t show how the
system evolves in time. The trellis is a structure that makes the time evolution explicit.
An example is shown in Figure 7-5. Each column of the trellis has the set of states; each
state in a column is connected to two states in the next column—the same two states in
the state diagram. The top link from each state in a column of the trellis shows what gets
transmitted on a “0”, while the bottom shows what gets transmitted on a “1”. The picture
SECTION 7.5. THE TRELLIS 9

shows the links between states that are traversed in the trellis given the message 101100.
We can now think about what the decoder needs to do in terms of this trellis. It gets a
sequence of parity bits, and needs to determine the best path through the trellis—that is,
the sequence of states in the trellis that can explain the observed, and possibly corrupted,
sequence of received parity bits.
The Viterbi decoder finds a maximum-likelihood path through the trellis. We will
study it in the next chapter.

Problems and exercises on convolutional coding are at the end of the next chapter, after we
discuss the decoding process.