Erasure decoding in burst-error channels

A proven means of communicating reliably in a burst-error channel is the code interleaving scheme. Code symbols from a number of component codes are interleaved before being sent through the channel. This method effectively distributes the error detection and correction burden among the component codes and makes errors occurring in a codeword from each component code more or less independent. Erasure decoding techniques allow further refinement on the code interleaving concept. Their application leads to improved overall code performance when the symbol depth of the lead code is shallow compared to the average error-burst length of the channel. Theoretical formulations derived for predicting the performance of separate decoding and erasure decoding schemes are valuable in providing reasonably good estimates on redundancy requirements of the component codes.