Codes Correcting Burst and Arbitrary Erasures for Reliable and Low-Latency Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new explicit convolutional code construction capable of correcting burst and arbitrary erasures with low decoding delay, suitable for modern low-latency network applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a simple, explicit convolutional code construction with efficient algorithms that corrects both burst and arbitrary erasures under a delay constraint, with linear field size.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over existing low-delay codes in simulations.

Efficient encoding and decoding algorithms for the proposed codes.

Field size linear in the delay constraint T.

Abstract

Motivated by modern network communication applications which require low latency, we study codes that correct erasures with low decoding delay. We provide a simple explicit construction that yields convolutional codes that can correct both burst and arbitrary erasures under a maximum decoding delay constraint $T$. Our proposed code has efficient encoding/decoding algorithms and requires a field size that is linear in $T$. We study the performance of our code over the Gilbert-Elliot channel; our simulation results show significant performance gains over low-delay codes existing in the literature.