Questions you should be able to answer:

1. Explain the shape of preformance curves for codes, i.e. bit-error rate and block-error-rate
2. How are product codes defined? What are their parameters, advantages and disadvantages?
3. What is the idea behind generalized concatenation? What are the parameters of the construction
4. Explain the Bhattacharya bound for the BSC and the AWGN channel.
5. Sketch the main elements of a performance bound for convolutional codes.
6. What is the main idea of Ungerboeck's trellis coded modulation?
7. What would you answer somebody who states: Coding is bad because it adds redundancy! OR  Is a bandwidth expansion necessary to get a coding gain?
8. How are turbo codes constructed? Sketch the important elements in the construction.
9. What is a factor graph and how is it used?
10. Describe the sum-product algorithm
11. Describe the min-sum algorithm
12. How are regular and irregular LDPC codes defined?
13. What is the main idea behind density-evolution?
14. Sketch a factor graph for a [7,4,3] Hamming code and perform the first two iterations of a sum-product algorithm for a given received vector.
15. Derive the message passing rules for a (2,3)-LDPC code.