Majority Manchester decoding for active redundant data transmission

Abstract

Reliable real time data transmission ought to be able to tolerate both transient faults and line failures. The former are readily dealt with by employing appropriate error control coding, whereas the latter require multiple transmission lines. The conventional approach is to use one active and several standby channels. However, utilizing all available channels through multiple feeding and implementing active redundant receivers allows instantaneous recovery from line failures. We investigate such receiver structures for a data transmission system based on a double-error correcting BCH-code with underlying Manchester line coding and three parallel data links. Different approaches for implementing majority voting strategies are compared with respect to overall error handling capabilities. As a result we will propose an optimal structure called majority Manchester decoder requiring only moderate implementation overhead.