error correction code upper bound

Question

If I want to send a d-bit packet and add another r bits for error correction code (d>r)
how many errors I can find and correct at most?

Answer 1

You should probably read the wikipedia page on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error%5Fdetection%5Fand%5Fcorrection

It sounds like you specifically want a Hamming Code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming%5Fcode#General%5Falgorithm

Using that scheme, you can look up some example values from the linked table.

Answer 2

You have 2^d different kinds of packets of length d bits you want to send. Adding your r bits to them makes them into codewords of length d+r, so now you have 2^d possible codewords you could send. The receiver could get 2^(d+r) different received words(codewords with possible errors). The question then becomes, how do you map those 2^(d+r) received words to the 2^d codewords?

This comes down to the minimum distance of the code. That is, for each pair of codewords, find the number of bits where they differ, then take the smallest of those values.

Let's say you had a minimum distance of 3. You received a word and you notice that it isn't one of the codewords. That is, there's an error. So, for the lack of a better decoding algorithm, you flip the first bit, and see if its a codeword. If it isn't you flip it back and flip the next one. Eventually, you get a codeword. Since all codewords differ in 3 positions, you know this codeword is the "closest" to the received word, since you would have to flip 2 bits in the received word to get to another codeword. If you didn't get a codeword from flipping just one bit at a time, you can't figure out where the errors are, since there are multiple codewords you could get to by flipping two bits, but you know there are at least two errors.

This leads to the general principle that for a minimum distance md, you can detect md-1 errors and correct floor((md-1)/2) errors. Calculating the minimum distance depends on the details of how you generate the codewords, otherwise known as the code. There are various bounds you can use to figure out an upper limit on md based on d and (d+r).

Paul mentioned the Hamming Code, which is a good example. It achieves the Hamming bound. For the (7,4) Hamming code, you have 4 bit messages and 7 bit codewords, and you achieve a minimum distance of 3. Obviously*, you are never going to get a minimum distance greater than the number of bits you are adding so this is the very best you can do. Don't get too used to this though. The Hamming code is one of the few examples of a non-trivial perfect code, and most of those have a minimum distance that is less than the number of bits you add.

*It's not really obvious, but I'm pretty sure it's true for non-trivial error correcting codes. Adding one parity bit gets you a minimum distance of two, allowing you to detect an error. The code consisting of {000,111} gets you a minimum distance of 3 by adding just 2 bits, but it's trivial.