High-Rate Permutation Coding with Unequal Error Protection

Channel coding provides numerous advantages to digital communications. One of such advantages is error correcting capabilities. This, however, comes at the expense of coding rate, which is a function of the codebook’s cardinality |C| or number of coded information bits and the codeword length M. In order to achieve high coding rate, we hereby report a channel coding approach that is capable of error correction under power line communications (PLC) channel conditions, with permutation coding as the coding scheme of choice. The approach adopts the technique of unequal error correction for binary codes, but with the exception that non-binary permutation codes are employed here. As such, certain parts of the information bits are coded with permutation symbols, while transmitting other parts uncoded. Comparisons with other conventional permutation codes are presented, with the proposed scheme exhibiting a relatively competitive performance in terms of symbol error rate.