Unequal error control codes with two‐level burst and bit error correcting capabilities

Abstract

SUMMARYIn some computer and communication systems, such as in holographic memories, burst errors often occur, and some parts of the word have lower reliability, that is, higher error rate, than the other parts. This paper considers words to be divided into two blocks according to the error rate: a block with higher error rate X 1 , and the other block with lower error rate X 2 . This presents a code which corrects l-bit (≥ 2) burst errors occurring in X 1 as well as single-bit errors occurring in X 2 . This also demonstrates an evaluation of the codes on code length and the parallel decoder hardware amount. The check bit length of the proposed code is as short as the bound when the length of block X 1 is less than 2l.

The Future of Computer Technology and its Implications for the Computer Industry

“…Surely, if resource is at a premium more should be used to protect the MSB than the LSB? The concept of unequal error correction has been applied to communications protocols (protecting the routing information more strongly than the data payload) [9], but there seems to be considerably more scope here than is currently exploited.…”