Giovanni Cancellieri - Böcker

This study is designed for graduate technicians working in laboratories or quality test offices, as well as academics and industrial researchers in optical communications and optical sensors and students attending postgraudate courses on optical engineering. It aims to provide a survey of the methods for fiber optics experimental characterization and includes details of each technique, including basic concepts, critical aspects of their practical implementation, and estimates on the accuracy and repeatability of the results obtained from the measurements. The discussion also covers commercially available field testing equipment.

The book offers an original view on channel coding, based on a unitary approach to block and convolutional codes for error correction. It presents both new concepts and new families of codes. For example, lengthened and modified lengthened cyclic codes are introduced as a bridge towards time-invariant convolutional codes and their extension to time-varying versions. The novel families of codes include turbo codes and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, the features of which are justified from the structural properties of the component codes. Design procedures for regular LDPC codes are proposed, supported by the presented theory. Quasi-cyclic LDPC codes, in block or convolutional form, represent one of the most original contributions of the book. The use of more than 100 examples allows the reader gradually to gain an understanding of the theory, and the provision of a list of more than 150 definitions, indexed at the end of the book, permits rapid location of sought information.