NASA NTRS1989
Convolutional codes have played and will play a key role in the downlink telemetry systems on many NASA deep-space probes, including Voyager, Magellan, and Galileo. One of the chief difficulties associated with the use of convolutional codes, however, is the notorious difficulty of analyzing them. Given a convolutional code as specified, say, by its generator polynomials, it is no easy matter to say how well that code will perform on a given noisy channel. The usual first step in such an analysis is to computer the code's free distance; this can be done with an algorithm whose complexity is exponential in the code's constraint length. The second step is often to calculate the transfer function in one, two, or three variables, or at least a few terms in its power series expansion. This step is quite hard, and for many codes of relatively short constraint lengths, it can be intractable. However, a large class of convolutional codes were discovered for which the free distance can be computed by inspection, and for which there is a closed-form expression for the three-variable transfer function. Although for large constraint lengths, these codes have relatively low rates, they are nevertheless interesting and potentially useful. Furthermore, the ideas developed here to analyze these specialized codes may well extend to a much larger class.