Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Convolutional Codes over Binary Symmetric Channel Using MATLAB

The most common concern of any communication system is the data quality. There exist different components that can impact the quality of data during its conveying over the channel as noise, fading, etc. Forward error correcting codes (FEC) play a major role for overcoming this noise as it adds a control bits to the original data for error detection and correction. This paper aims at analyzing convolutional codes with different rates and evaluating its performance. Binary phase shift modulation (BPSK) scheme and binary symmetric channel (BSC) model are used. First a convolution encoder is presented and then additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is added. The paper uses maximum likelihood mechanism (Vetribi Algorithm) for decoding process. Simulations are carried out using MATLAB with Simulink tools. Bit error rate (BET) is used as testing parameter and results of system behavior for both coded and encoded are compared.