The field of channel coding began with Claude Shannon’s 1948 landmark paper, in which he introduced the notion of channel capacity and used a random coding argument to prove the existence of codes that can achieve reliable communication at rates approaching capacity. For the past 65 years, researchers in electrical engineering, mathematics, computer science, and related fields have been trying to construct codes, with practical encoding and decoding procedures, that can approach the performance promised by Shannon. For the first 45 years, these efforts fell short of the mark. Then, with the invention of turbo codes in 1993 and the re-discovery of LDPC codes a few years later, the goal of practical capacity approaching codes came within reach. Since that time, the area of channel coding has undergone a remarkable revival that has resulted in the replacement of many time-honored coding standards with modern, capacity approaching techniques in areas such as deep space communication, digital video broadcasting, mobile cellular telephony, high-speed cable transmission, and digital magnetic recording.

The special issue will focus on the latest advances in modern coding theory, with special emphasis on polar codes and spatially coupled LDPC codes . We solicit papers that present original and previously unpublished work on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Polar codes
• Spatially coupled (convolutional) LDPC codes
• LDPC block codes and codes on graphs
• Algebraic and protograph-based constructions of LDPC codes
• Turbo codes, including parallel, serial, and hybrid concatenation
• Repeat-accumulate type codes
• Rateless codes and applications to erasure channels
• Spinal codes, braided codes, and staircase codes
• Iterative decoding methods
• LP decoding of capacity approaching codes
• Density evolution and EXIT chart techniques
• Finite-length analysis of  capacity approaching codes
• Low complexity/low energy codes, joint source-channel codes, secure and error-resilient codes

Submission Guidelines:

Authors should refer to the submission rules specified in the “ Information for Authors ” section of the JSAC guidelines to prepare their papers. Papers should be submitted through EDAS .

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2015   
First reviews: August 1, 2015
Second reviews/acceptance: Oct. 1, 2015
Final Manuscript Due: Nov. 1, 2015
Publication Date: January 2016

Guest Editors:                                                                                         

Prof. Erdal Arıkan , Bilkent Univ., [email protected]
Prof. Daniel Costello , Univ. of Notre Dame, [email protected]                     
Prof. Joerg Kliewer , New Jersey Inst. Tech., [email protected]              
Prof. Michael Lentmaier , Lund Univ., [email protected]            
Prof. Paul Siegel , Univ. of Calif., San Diego, [email protected]              
Prof. Ruediger Urbanke , EPFL, [email protected]