In coding theory, a zigzag code is a type of

linear Linearity is the property of a mathematical relationship (''function'') that can be graphically represented as a straight line. Linearity is closely related to '' proportionality''. Examples in physics include rectilinear motion, the linear r ...

error-correcting code In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, an error correction code, sometimes error correcting code, (ECC) is used for controlling errors in data over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea is ...

introduced by .. They are defined by partitioning the input data into segments of fixed size, and adding sequence of check bits to the data, where each check bit is the exclusive or of the bits in a single segment and of the previous check bit in the sequence. The

code rate In telecommunication and information theory, the code rate (or information rateHuffman, W. Cary, and Pless, Vera, ''Fundamentals of Error-Correcting Codes'', Cambridge, 2003.) of a forward error correction code is the proportion of the data-strea ...

is high: where is the number of bits per segment. Its worst-case ability to correct transmission errors is very limited: in the worst case it can only detect a single bit error and cannot correct any errors. However, it works better in the soft-decision model of decoding: its regular structure allows the task of finding a maximum-likelihood decoding or a posteriori probability decoding to be performed in constant time per input bit.

References

Coding theory Error detection and correction {{telecommunications-stub