Network coding/forward error correction code for multiple-input multiple-output wireless communication system

A reliable wireless communication channel is amongst the most important issues in a wireless network. Due to its nature, a reliable wireless communication channel is a challenge to provide. Wireless channel diversity is an efficient technique to achieve reliable transmission. Multi-antenna exploits spatial diversity as a method that has been proved to drastically increase channel capacity while keeping bit error rates (BER) near Shannon (lower bound) limits. Forward error correction code (FEC) or channel coding is an error control technique that is used to provide a time diversity to immunize data against errors over the noisy and unreliable wireless channel (Duman & Ghrayeb, 2007). The main idea behind FEC is that the transmitter encodes data by using error correction code (ECC) to add redundancy. This redundancy allows the receiver to detect and correct a specific number of bits in error - at a time - that may occur in the data stream. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems combined with channel coding are shown to improve system BER and channel capacity performance in wireless communications. The combination is often referred to as a coded MIMO system. The aim of this research is to design or improve a FEC code algorithm for wireless communication network. This algorithm should be suitable to combine with MIMO system and be able to detect and correct the corrupted data in order to decrease the BER and increase wireless channel efficiency. The computational complexity and the data overhead will be used to measure the performance efficiency of the proposed algorithm.