Error Correcting Codes for Segmented Burst-Deletion Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces error correction codes tailored for segmented burst-deletion channels, enabling reliable data transmission despite bursty synchronization errors by leveraging existing codes and boundary detection techniques.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel coding scheme for segmented burst-deletion channels that combines existing one-burst deletion codes with boundary detection, achieving low redundancy.

Findings

Codes achieve redundancy of O(log b)

Effective boundary detection during decoding

Applicable to arbitrary alphabets

Abstract

We study segmented burst-deletion channels motivated by the observation that synchronization errors commonly occur in a bursty manner in real-world settings. In this channel model, transmitted sequences are implicitly divided into non-overlapping segments, each of which may experience at most one burst of deletions. In this paper, we develop error correction codes for segmented burst-deletion channels over arbitrary alphabets under the assumption that each segment may contain only one burst of t-deletions. The main idea is to encode the input subsequence corresponding to each segment using existing one-burst deletion codes, with additional constraints that enable the decoder to identify segment boundaries during the decoding process from the received sequence. The resulting codes achieve redundancy that scales as O(log b), where b is the length of each segment.