MIT 6.451 Principles of Digital Communication II

This course is the second of a two-term sequence with 6.450. The focus is on coding techniques for approaching the Shannon limit of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, their performance analysis, and design principles. After a review of 6.450 and the Shannon limit for AWGN channels, the course begins by discussing small signal constellations, performance analysis and coding gain, and hard-decision and soft-decision decoding. It continues with binary linear block codes, Reed-Muller codes, finite fields, Reed-Solomon and BCH codes, binary linear convolutional codes, and the Viterbi algorithm. Created by MIT OpenCourseWare.


Average Course Length

50 hours


Skill Level

Intermediate



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1: Lecture 1
2: Lecture 2
3: Lecture 3
4: Lecture 4
5: Lecture 5
6: Lecture 6
7: Lecture 7
8: Lecture 8
9: Lecture 9
10: Lecture 10
11: Lecture 11
12: Lecture 12
13: Lecture 13
14: Lecture 14
15: Lecture 15
16: Lecture 16
17: Lecture 17
18: Lecture 18
19: Lecture 19
20: Lecture 20
21: Lecture 21
22: Lecture 22
23: Lecture 23
24: Lecture 24
25: Lecture 25