Note: The following provides a suggested course description, objectives, and an outline. These may be modified pending discussion with the Faculty Chairs, proposing faculty, and other curriculum reviewers.

Course Description: Definition of a measure of information and study of its properties; introduction to channel capacity and error-free communications over noisy channels; rate distortion theory; error detecting and correcting codes.

Course Objectives: To provide an intermediate level treatment of information theory, source coding, and error correction coding.

Course Outline by Topical Areas:

• The Communication System Model
• Basic mathematical structures
• Galois fields
• Linear block codes
• Polynomial rings and fields
• Cyclic block codes
• BCH and Reed-Solomon codes
• Decoding BCH and Reed-Solomon codes
• Convolutional codes
• The Viterbi Algorithm